Forming new words

Text 3

Creating a word.

Dictionaries.

Words and their life cycle.

Express your own opinion of the content of the text.

Discuss the text in class.

11. Choose any of the following topics to write a short essay:

1) How many words are there in English?

5) From time to time men feel the need for a new word…

Another method of forming new words is derivation. Aderivative is a word formed by adding affixes to another word or to a bound base. This process of making words is also an old and a productive one in English. Kindly, kindness, unkind are all derivatives of kind, as are liberal, liberty, and liberate of the bound base liber-. Kind and its derivatives are native English forma­tions, whereas the derivatives of liber- are loan-words from Latin and French and thus had been formed before they entered English. Because the actual coinage of the latter group of words took place in another language, their parts are not as immediately obvious as those of native formations like kindness.

Like compounding, derivation is a process of word-making that is still much used. Some new derivatives are formed because otherwise we have no simple way to express their meaning. When heads of state began holding "summit meetings" to discuss diplomatic problems, we needed a word for the process and thus coined summitry. When one scholar needed to talk frequently about "making something unambiguous," he formed the derivative disambiguate; clarify might have done as well, but presumably the greater precision of disambiguate offset its lack of grace. Other derivatives are formed because English speakers are dissatisfied with an existing expression. Thus, the tradi­tional name for a collector of antiques is antiquary, but some antiquaries prefer the new derivative antiquer. Presumably antiquary sounds too dustily antiquated. It is one of the ironies of our society that we must be thoroughly modern, even in our collecting of the old. One Midwestern city has a Detoxi­fication Center, which seems to be a place where drunks can sober up; detoxi­fication was probably chosen for the name because it sounds more scientific, antiseptic, and impersonal than sobering. It is of course also more pompous. Occasionally derivatives are formed merely because they are pompous, or impressive—according to one's opinion. A television reporter talks about the unusuality of an accident, by analogy with words like eventuality, because he thinks the Franco-Latin suffix -ity has more "class" than native English -ness.

Compounds combine two or more bases with each other, and derivatives combine affixes with a base. In both cases whole morphemes are being joined. Two other kinds of word-making, blending and acronymy, combine not whole morphemes, but usually just fragments. In a blend, the sounds and meanings of two words are partly combined, whether by accident or by design. A person who is talking comes to a point at which his ideas could be expressed by either of two words. Instead of choosing between them, he pronounces part of one word and part of the other. For example, someone is saying, "I felt ____run down my back," and hesitates at the blank, with the words shiver and chill both in the back of his mind.

The two words are, as it were superimposed at the point where they are similar in sound, they blend together, and what actually comes out is "I felt a shill run down my back." Blends of this sort are slips of the tongue that are exceedingly common. In fact, if you are aware of their existence and start listening for them, you will hear a great many, both from other people and in your own speech. Such blends are nonce words, that is, they are coined on one occa­sion, perhaps inadvertently. No one takes particular note of them, so they are never used again. Sometimes, however, the same blend is created repeat­edly or is imitated because it is useful, and it will consequently enter the vocabulary as a new word. One recent example is meld 'merge' from melt and weld. In blends it is not only the pronunciation that is combined, but the meaning also. Thus the new meld combines the notion of 'firm union' from weld with the notion of 'flowing liquid' from melt. A somewhat older example is flurry, a blend of flutter, and hurry.

In addition to blends that are slips of the tongue, there are blends that have been deliberately created. When our space program invented a combination of a balloon and a parachute to aid in the return of space capsules to earth, it was named a ballute. A few years ago a health-fad advocated the consumption of a half-and-half mixture of honey and cider vinegar, dubbed honegar. The executive secretary to an editor of a fashionable magazine may become an executary. A middlescent is someone between young adulthood and senior citizenship. The W.C.T.U. has promoted the "fruit fiesta," or fruesta, as a substitute for the cocktail hour. An atomitatis an atomic habitat, or an underground house. A guesstimate frees the guesstimator o f responsibility for error.

Blends are not limited to single words. When the financial reporter for a small newspaper wrote that stocks had tumbled to a new time low, he apparently blended a new low with an all-time low. Many blends, like this one, belong to the pathology of language. Others are fanciful in origin. Only a few become productive and survive as additions to the vocabulary.

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