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In the ’80s, HBO’s satirical sketch comedy series Not Necessarily the News included a segment by Rich Hall featuring a creation of his called Snigl ets. A snig let was defined as “any word that doesn’t appear in the dictionary, but should.” Fans started sending in their own suggestions, and several sni glet books grew out of all this.
I recall being scornful at the time of many of the submissions, because people were creating names for things that already had names.
For example, someone suggested a cute name for the tip of a shoelace; but there was already a name for that: aglet. Someone suggested a name for the little vertical groove that runs between your nose and the center of your upper lip. There was already a name for that: philtrum. And the space behind your knee? Oh, come on, people, that’s the popliteal space. (OK, I guess that last one might be just the teensiest bit obscure).
Back in the sn iglet days, naming ob jects that had been around for generations was a chancy business, primarily because All The Knowledge Of The Universe was not yet available at our very fingertips on the Internet. Today you would just google “shoelace tip” or any other objec t to see if it already had a name.
The naming of actions, on the other hand, or of thoughts or sounds or unusual concepts—there was plenty of room for creativity there in the ’80s.
One snig let I still remember: Pupsqueak - the funny little noise a dog makes at the end of a yawn.
I recall other snigl et definitions, but not the sni glets themselves. One definition was “what you do when you’re vacuuming, and there’s that ONE bit of lint that the vacuum won’t pick up, and you reach down and pick it up and look at it earnestly—and then put it back down on the carpet to give it ONE MORE CHANCE.”
That’s ridiculous—except I’ve done that very thing.
These days you can find collections of new coinages on several web sites. Are they clever? Perhaps. Funny? Sometimes. Dumb? Often. And few of them will ever find their way into the language as “real” words.
Some new words do, however, eventually become acceptable. That’s how language changes over time. The term for newly coined words or usages is neologism (nee-AHL-uh-jizum). Most neologisms generally lack the explicit playfulness of sn iglets and their ilk. And neologisms frequently annoy purists, who contend that only established words are acceptable for our use. That’s a tough position to take these days, when obj ects and actions that literally never existed before come along every day and we have to call them something. Besides, if the purists carried the day, we’d all still sound like something from The Canterbury Tales.
I have mixed emotions about neologisms. Sometimes I come down on the side of the “no new words allowed” crowd, as I did recently when the local paper’s caption of a photo of a victorious political candidate said the man was shaking hands with “a congratulator.”
Excuse me? There’s no such word.
On the other hand, I can really appreciate the term I came across on unwords.com: onosecond. That’s the tiny fraction of a second between the moment you click the Send button and when you realize you should NOT have sent that e-mail.
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