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Word Spy: The Word Lover's Guide to Modern Culture - Softcover

McFedries, Paul

 
9780767914666: Word Spy: The Word Lover's Guide to Modern Culture
Softcover
ISBN 10: 076791466X ISBN 13: 9780767914666
Verlag: Broadway, 2004

Inhaltsangabe

Language wears many hats, but its most important job is to help us name or describe what's in the world. Words define us, our actions, even our existence. And just when you think that you have all the words you need, you discover new ones, hear new uses for old ones or see them mutate right before your eyes—a neologism is born.

Those neologisms are actually one of the best ways of keeping tabs on the way our world and culture are changing. One of the people who's been keeping tabs is Paul McFedries, the president of Logophilia Limited (logophilia is Greek for "the love of words"). His scorecard is Word Spy, a daily newsletter that has been reporting from the neological frontier since 1998 and that has more than 100,000 visitors a month and more than 12 million page views. In Word Spy, McFedries demonstrates how new words both reflect and illuminate not only the subcultures that coin them but also the larger culture in which these groups exist. Neologisms give us insight into the way things are even as they act as linguistic harbingers of what's to come. Each chapter of Word Spy is a cultural snapshot, a slice of the zeitgeist that focuses on a specific idea or sociological phenomenon, with an emphasis on the words and phrases that it has generated. These snapshots cover various aspects of modern life, including relationships, business, technology, war, aging, multiculturalism, and even fast food, all the while introducing us to hybrid words: If your kids can't seem to get away from their computers, they may be addicted to "fritterware" (time-wasting game software). If you're a new mother with a passion for petitioning, you may be a "lactivist" (breast-feeding activist). And if you keep finding yourself staying way later at the office than you ever imagined, you may be suffering from "presenteeism."

Word Spy is an exciting and informative travelogue through the evolving landscape of our language and, consequently, the cultures and subcultures that continually mold and shape not just the language but all of us who speak it.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

PAUL McFEDRIES is the creator of Logophilia Limited and has written more than forty books that have sold over 2.3 million copies worldwide. These books include many titles in the Complete Idiot's Guide series, including The Complete Idiot's Guide to a Smart Vocabulary.

Aus dem Klappentext

Language wears many hats, but its most important job is to help us name or describe what's in the world. Words define us, our actions, even our existence. And just when you think that you have all the words you need, you discover new ones, hear new uses for old ones or see them mutate right before your eyes a neologism is born.

Those neologisms are actually one of the best ways of keeping tabs on the way our world and culture are changing. One of the people who's been keeping tabs is Paul McFedries, the president of Logophilia Limited (logophilia is Greek for "the love of words"). His scorecard is Word Spy, a daily newsletter that has been reporting from the neological frontier since 1998 and that has more than 100,000 visitors a month and more than 12 million page views. In Word Spy, McFedries demonstrates how new words both reflect and illuminate not only the subcultures that coin them but also the larger culture in which these groups exist. Neologisms give us insight into the way things are even as they act as linguistic harbingers of what's to come. Each chapter of Word Spy is a cultural snapshot, a slice of the zeitgeist that focuses on a specific idea or sociological phenomenon, with an emphasis on the words and phrases that it has generated. These snapshots cover various aspects of modern life, including relationships, business, technology, war, aging, multiculturalism, and even fast food, all the while introducing us to hybrid words: If your kids can't seem to get away from their computers, they may be addicted to "fritterware" (time-wasting game software). If you're a new mother with a passion for petitioning, you may be a "lactivist" (breast-feeding activist). And if you keep finding yourself staying way later at the office than you ever imagined, you may be suffering from "presenteeism."

Word Spy is an exciting and informative travelogue through the evolving landscape of our language and, consequently, the cultures and subcultures that continually mold and shape not just the language but all of us who speak it.

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Chapter 1

A Mosaic of New Words

A community is known by the language it keeps, and its words chronicle the times. Every aspect of the life of a people is reflected in the words they use to talk about themselves and the world around them. As their world changes--through invention, discovery, revolution, evolution, or personal transformation--so does their language. Like the growth rings of a tree, our vocabulary bears witness to our past. --John Algeo

The bold and discerning writer who, recognizing the truth that language must grow by innovation if it grow at all, makes new words and uses the old in an unfamiliar sense, has no following and is tartly reminded that "it isn't in the dictionary" although down to the time of the first lexicographer (Heaven forgive him!) no author ever had used a word that was in the dictionary. --Ambrose Bierce

ne-ol-o-gism noun A meaningless word coined by a psychotic. --Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary

What could be more relevant, more interesting, more fun than new words? Well, yes, lots of things. However, for many people a newly minted word is one of life's little pleasures, something that can be counted among what James Boswell called "the small excellencies." But then there are those of us who have been stricken with a malady that I call neologophilia, the intense attraction--oh, why not say it?--the love of new words.

This ailment's happy sufferers exhibit an unvarying collection of symptoms: an untrammeled glee at coming across a new word in a book or newspaper; an unquenchable curiosity about life, because, as you'll see, new words lead us into new worlds; an unending wonder at the amazing plasticity of the language and at the relentless creativity of those who use it; and an unceasing urge to coin new words (and, of course, an unabashed desire to weave these new coinages into cocktail party conversations).

I came down with this affliction many years ago, and I've been clam-happy ever since. I enjoy words and language in general, but what sets my crank a-turning is, as H. L. Mencken said, "the biology of language, as opposed to its paleontology." I love the living language more than the fossilized variety with its hardened meanings and set-in-stone lexicon. To put it another way, although I get as much pleasure as anyone out of a dictionary, the words it contains are, well, domesticated. I love the wild, untamed neologisms that romp around the linguistic wilderness. When I see a new word in an article or book, I get a little jolt of excitement, a mental shock akin to seeing an animal live for the first time while walking in the woods. I'm not looking to hunt the word, or tame it, or capture it for inclusion in some kind of lexical zoo. Instead, I take a snapshot of the word--I record the source and the citation--that shows the word in its natural environment.

And that, more than anything, explains what this book is all about. It's a series of cultural snapshots, with the lens focused on new words and phrases that tell us something about our world. These snapshots cover various slices of modern life, including relationships, business, technology, war, aging, multiculturalism, and even fast food. I define each word, tell you when it first appeared in print, provide a citation from the media that shows how the word is used, and give you some cultural background--stats, stories, trends, and tidbits--that put the word into context. Taken together, I hope these snapshots will form a larger picture of our modern culture. Have you ever seen one of those images that, when examined closely, turns out to be made up of thousands of smaller pictures? It's called a mosaic, and that's the metaphor that underlies this book. It's a mosaic of new words.

Why go to all this trouble? After all, aren't new words, at best, mere trifles soon to be forgotten or, at worst, signs of linguistic decay? I have to respond with a big, fat "No!" on both counts. It's my unshakable belief that, putting it as simply as I can, new words matter. Why? Two reasons: new words reflect our culture, and they have universal appeal.

New Words Reflect Our Culture

Words are a mirror of their times. By looking at the areas in which the vocabulary of a language is expanding fastest in a given period, we can form a fairly accurate impression of the chief preoccupations of society at that time and the points at which the boundaries of human endeavour are being advanced. --John Ayto

Language wears many hats, but its most important job is to help us name or describe what's in the world. As the American writer and editor Howard Rheingold says, "Finding a name for something is a way of conjuring its existence, of making it possible for people to see a pattern where they didn't see anything before." So we have nouns for things, verbs for actions, and adjectives and adverbs for describing those things and actions. But the world changes. Constantly. New things are created; old things are modified; light bulbs are appearing over people's heads all the time, signaling new ideas and theories; people do things differently; they look at existing things from new perspectives. Today's world is different in a thousand ways from yesterday's world.

So if language describes the world, and if the world changes, then language must also change as a way of keeping up with the world. We're compelled to create new words to name and describe our new inventions and ideas and institutions; we're driven to create new meanings for existing words to accommodate our newly modified things and actions.

It follows then--and this is the central premise of this book--that you can understand the culture by examining its new words, by going out to what one linguist calls the "vibrant edges" of language. However, it's not enough just to note the existence of a neologism and move on to the next one. Each new word reflects something about the culture, but you have to examine the word closely to see the details of that reflection. How is the word being used? Who is using it? What are the cultural factors that gave rise to and nourish the word's existence? Each new word opens a door (one writer likened them to "the doorbells of the mind") that leads you to a room with various cultural and sociological artifacts. The Czech playwright Daniela Fischerova said it best: "Every new word is a new reality."

New words both reflect and illuminate not only the subcultures that coin them, but also our culture as a whole. New words give us insight into the way things are even as they act as linguistic harbingers (or canaries in the cultural coal mine), giving us a glimpse of (or a warning about) what's to come. Here's the lexicographer Victoria Neufeldt on this neologism-as-cultural-reflection idea:

The neologisms that especially capture our attention are indeed often remarkable; some with their metaphorical baggage can constitute miniature sociological studies in themselves--like McJob, for instance, which for comprehension depends on all the associations and connotations of the name McDonald's, as well as an awareness of the difficulties of the current employment situation, in particular for new graduates wanting to enter the workforce.

New Words Have Universal Appeal

Slang . . . is a monument to the language's force of growth by creative innovation, a living example of the democratic, normally anonymous process of language change, and the chief means whereby all the languages spoken today have evolved from earlier tongues. --Mario Pei

Each new word is a story that tells us something about our lives and our times, but there are, as they say, a million stories in the naked city. New words and new meanings are coined with a breathtaking frequency and trying to catalog them all is like herding...

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Verlag
Broadway
Erscheinungsdatum
2004
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
076791466X
ISBN 13 
9780767914666
Einband
Taschenbuch
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
432
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Verantwortliche Person
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