The Invention of Personal Thesaurus.
I really enjoy English newspapers. Part of it is that reading vitriol about the government is easier to stomach when you didn’t vote for that government. But a big part of it is the language. The English press isn’t afraid to use puns, shorthand, or even make up words. Especially for headlines.
I suppose it started with names, turning Michael Jackson into Jacko, Madonna into Madge, and Paul Gasciogne into Gazza. But it extends to more. Recently, I found the word “flaffing”. What does flaffing mean? Originally it appeared to be a synonym for “flapping”, but gets used to describe how some women go on and on about how many pints their husbands consume instead of coming home and sweeping the front steps. Other notable headlines include “Zaraghhh! Royal Sent Flying Off Horse” and “Choc His Hand Off: Sweetie Thief Faces Amputation.. And Jail.” Really, really dramatic stuff.
Back to flaffing. A simple internet search proves this is new to me, but not so to the folks across the pond who’ve been slinging it around for decades. But what it raises questions about two things: Where do new words come from and how do they get retained in popular vocabulary?
The second question seems a bit easier to answer. We all have a code we use that skirts the fringes of “textbook” English. With 250,000 words in common usage, there really isn’t a “standard” English. With this kind of room to play, we all essentially create individual vocabularies. But we use them more often than just when we talk to ourselves. They’re more like tribal vocabularies. For example: Everyone’s got a grandma, but some of us call her gram, grammy, oma, nana, bub bub, etc.
That’s just one example. There’s already tons of cool colored maps and graphs that show whether you’re from a part of the country that says “bubbler” or “drinking fountain”, and whether you “take a turn” or “spell” someone. The point is: we’ve got these strange word caches that we use, and those closest to us know exactly what we’re talking about, while strangers tilt their heads at the strange music we’re making.
Back to the first question: where do these words come from. With the internet as it is, digital life feels constructed, like someone creates a word in hopes it might become the latest meme to appear in feeds around the world. I’m sure there’s a bit of that, but I like to think of word creation as an instant inspiration. A collision of vowel sounds and physical reaction. Stub your toe and you curse the jingoo step that you knew was there. The word just appeared, fully formed like Athena from the head of Zeus.
Sure, you can decipher its meaning from context. It’s not a new idea, it’s just a new word. Which would make those moments thesaurus-forming ones, where we fumble for a better expression of what’s happening. And for all this flaffing on the subject, I think that’s pretty interesting.
