The Lexicographer's Rules

“It’s comedy, in Mandarin. As you can see, it’s a man dressed in a bikini outfit so you know it has to be a comedy.” (Source Link)

Astonishing what extrasensory knowledge Charles Harrington Elster must have of the vast files at Merriam-Webster in order to speak so self-authoritatively about what’s standard, common, or normal for American English speakers. It’s a good demonstration of the difference between an opinion based on wishful thinking or anecdotal evidence, and an opinion based on data. The MW editors didn’t choose to include variant pronunciations out of whimsy—they included them because they exist and are common.

Prescriptivism vs. descriptivism aside, the main problem I have with Elster’s article is that it’s so, well, done. It’s the same-old, same-old.

There are two usages in the article, incidentally, that can be used as clues there, and elsewhere, that the writing might be suspect. The first is the un-ironical use of the word “maven” (twice) and the second is the phrase “agree to disagree.” I have a long list of such red-flag terms that have proven fairly reliable at helping me decide whether a piece of writing is worth more examination. There’s nothing particularly wrong with “maven” or “agree to disagree,” it’s just that their presence tends to be heavily correlated to a lack of intellectual rigor or the use of cookie-cutter rhetoric. One of these days I’ll finally get somebody to build me a Bayesian BS-detector and then we’ll really have something.

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This is what it was like to be a blogger in early 1999 when you could still fit all the bloggers in New York City around a couple of tables. You’d need Madison Square Garden now. (Source Link)

Maybe this is the answer to all the emails I get from people claiming to have created a previously unknown word. Most of the time they’re wrong—they didn’t invent a unique word, but merely re-coined it (see this post on what “to coin” can now mean: not to invent a word, but merely to say it in a noteworthy fashion), or heard it before and it stuck in their subconscious, or even—and this is true—they know perfectly well they didn’t invent the word in question but they’re making a power grab anyway.

Much of the time, even if it does appear that the word is absolutely original (as far as can be determined in the searchable written record), the word is a sure loser. Doomed to fail, as most words are. They’re like mayflies, I always say—a single day on this earth looking for love, then oblivion. Like most of the words in Merriam-Webster’s Open Dictionary. Losers.

Yet there’s a need for recognition. That’s all most neologizing correspondents want. “Remember me. I was the one.”

Googlemark uses the Google programming interface to live search the Google index for the a string typed in the Googlemark search field. If it finds it, it says so. If it doesn’t, you get to register your word as a Googlemark. It’s like a trademark only for words that don’t exist in Google. That makes it your word. You now have some kind of proof. Of course, if you created a brand new word and Google indexed it before you can Googlemark it, then you’re screwed.

I found the site, incidentally, because someone tried to Googlemark chillax and clicked over to my web site when the word proved not to be Googlemarkable.

In any case, I Googlemarked the word butternuttership which I define as an unpaid internship in which the intern subsists on candy out of vending machines. It’s based loosely on the Nabisco Nutter Butter cookies with a slight rearrangement of the name. Not many vending machines have them, but snickership and trailmixship seemed like 12-hour losers instead of the full 24-hour loserdom of butternuttership.

And here’s my Googlemark for butternuttership (apparently the 107th Googlemarked word):

butternuttership

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For the past couple of weeks in the Provo, Utah, Daily Herald, D. Robert Carter has been laying out the highly entertaining life of Edwina Booth, a Provo-born actress who found stardom in the 1931 movie Trader Horn. Part one: Hollywood star began her life in still-standing Provo house, including mysterious divinations by a gypsy naming her “a child of destiny.” Part two: Edwina Booth’s fast and fateful rise to stardom, in which she is discovered by Hollywood star-makers on a Santa Monica beach. The most entertaining installment, discussing the travails of filming in Africa, is part three: Edwina in Africa: Cameras roll and crocodiles snap.