Editor’s note: Welcome to InDepthNH.org’s column Speaking of Words. Michael Ferber retired from the English Department at UNH, but has plenty more to say and write about words. We are thrilled he wants to do that for our readers. Welcome Michael!
Speaking of Words
By MICHAEL FERBER
I have been “speaking of words” in my columns, but do I know what I’m talking about? What is a word?
Is “ish” a word? Until recently it was only a suffix, first attached to national names (“English, Swedish”), then to various nouns (“selfish, childish”), and then to almost any short adjective, meaning “sort of” or “in a way” (“brownish, youngish”). Then in the 1980s it came unmoored and floated as almost a sentence in itself, as a rejoinder. “Are you happy?” “Ish.” Is it a word here, or is it shorthand for “happyish”?
How about “gonna”? It is obviously a compression of “going to,” and that is how we write it. But you cannot substitute “gonna” for every instance of “going to”: you cannot say “I’m gonna Boston tomorrow.” “Gonna” must be followed by a verb in the infinitive form: “I’m gonna go to Boston tomorrow.” It has become the future auxiliary (with a form of “be” preceding it), largely displacing “will” in daily speech. So it’s a word, though it’s not in all the dictionaries, and your Scrabble partner may object to it. You could make a similar case for “gotta” and “hafta” and “yusta.”
“Bling” is certainly a word, though it didn’t exist until about 2000. It arose, by one account, from “bling-bling,” a sound suggesting the glittering light reflected off diamonds. A reggae song used it as a kind of refrain. Was it a word then? It may have been dubious, but it soon became a noun: “He was loaded with bling at the party last night.” And then a verb: “She was really blinging at the reception.” So it’s a word now—or maybe two words, if we think the noun and the verb deserve separate entries. As a verb, I wonder, what is its past tense? It’s the norm in English that new verbs have regular (or “weak”) conjugations, hence we would expect “blinged” and “has blinged.” But it is tempting to make it imitate certain irregular (“strong”) verbs (“sing-sang-sung, ring-rang-rung, drink-drank-drunk”) and say “She really blang last night” and “He has often blung on weekends.” I like “blang” and “blung”; I’m gonna use them if I get the chance.
“Bling” has caught on, but what about made-up words that last a day or a week, or never leave a small coterie? Like many other people who ought to be doing something else, some friends and I have been inventing words from time to time since our college days. Here are a few:
indignition outrage over a car that won’t start
cantopener faulty kitchen tool
metrapolis large city from which there is no escape
ostrachize punish people by pretending they’re not there
fittishism worship of gymnasiums
sparendipity problem of mediocre bowlers
tadpool day-care center for frogs
(If you’d like more of these, let me know.) I think only a few dozen people have seen any of our coinages, and some coinages we have never used in a sentence. Does that rule them out as words? I don’t think so—it just rules them out of dictionaries.
Some languages have very different kinds of words from English and most other languages. The Eskimo languages Yupik and Inuit, for example, are “polysynthetic” languages, where words are put together out of a lot of little parts, few of which can stand alone as separate words; they often amount to sentences. Wikipedia gives an example from an Inuit dialect: tusaatsiarunnanngittualuujunga, which means “I cannot hear very well.” Polysynthesis throws a monkey wrench into the belief that there are a hundred Eskimo words for “snow.” Eskimos could make up thousands of them if they cared to. “Snow that falls lightly just before dawn” and “snow that is a pain in the neck to shovel” would each be single words, though long ones. For its part, English has several words (short ones) in the same semantic field as “snow”: “snow, slush, powder, crud, ice, sleet, hail, blizzard, flurry,” for instance, and some linguists have argued that Eskimo languages have no more roots than that for “snow,” roots to which they can attach any number of prefixes and suffixes. But if that seems to bury the one-hundred-words theory, other linguists have argued that, in fact, there are quite a few such roots, and that other languages that are not polysynthetic also have a very large snow vocabulary. On this subject, it seems, the last word has not been spoken.
Finally, let’s consider what is a good word. I mean, what are the rules in a given language that makes a word acceptable or not. Japanese, for example, does not allow consonant clusters such as fl- or str-, and -ns or -lp, and when it transliterates English words that have them it inserts little vowels. So “strike” in Japanese pronunciation (the word is often used) has five syllables, which in the Roman alphabet is su-to-ra-i-ku.
In English we disallow certain initial consonant clusters, such as pn-, ps-, and pt-, or kn- and gn-. We do, of course, have lots of words that are spelled with these clusters, such as “pneumonia, psyche, pterodactyl, knife, gnaw,” but of course we do not pronounce the first consonants. The first three of these words are Greek, and the Greeks had no trouble pronouncing the clusters; the last two are from our Germanic roots, and speakers of Old English sounded both pairs of consonants with perfect ease.
Such rules are called “phonotactic” rules. “Bling” obeys them; it is a good word. (So are “blang” and “blung,” for that matter.) In contrast, “sriracha” is not; I’ve never heard anyone pronounce it correctly. English allows shr- (“shrink, shrive”) but not sr-, and it allows sl- (“slim, slope”) but not shl- (except in German or Yiddish borrowings). Don’t ask me why.
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For a good book about words I can recommend Rochelle Lieber, Introducing Morphology, 3rd edition (Cambridge, 2021). And I would be glad to receive comments or questions: mferber@unh.edu.