Making up words (part one)

 

One of the nice things about language is that you can make up your own. I’m not talking about Esperanto or Interlingua or anything like although I’ve always found the notion of creating a new international language fascinating. I loved all the Newspeak in Nineteen Eighty-Four, the Cityspeak in Blade Runner and the Nadsat in A Clockwork Orange. Not that I have any problems with English which, odds are, will end up becoming the world language one day in one form or another and probably a heavily Americanised version but I could live with that. If you’re interested Wikipedia has a comprehensive list of constructed languages.

I remember the question of what language people spoke pre-Tower of Babel cropped up once in our house. My father reasoned that it would have been some form of Semitic tongue since Hebrew and Aramaic were the main languages of the Jews, God’s people, and he would have kept their language intact. (Aram was Shem’s son and Noah’s grandson.) The implication is, had original sin not occurred, and Eden had spread the whole world over then we’d all be speaking with Jewish accents and probably still running around stark naked. But seeing as what we’d all have perfect bodies we wouldn’t mind. I wondered where Yiddish came into the picture. It’s actually a High German language, an adopted tongue in the same way 1^st century Jews came to speak Greek because that’s what they needed to get by.

I don’t use very many Hebrew words. They’re kind of hard to slip into day-to-day conversation and actually the only ones that jump to mind at the moment are Sheol and shibboleth. Yiddish expressions I use not infrequently: schmuck I like and schlemiel, schmaltzy, shtuk and shtum. It’s strange how they all begin with the letter s but I have no answer for you. I asked my wife for one and she came up with “putz” – I didn’t take it personally. There is a term called Yinglish which is interesting but don’t get me started on Yeshivish.

The main use people make of their ability to expand the language is naming things. Okay most of us have names that go back hundreds if not thousands of years. James is a good couple of thousand years old: it’s derived from the same Hebrew name as Jacob, meaning ‘holds the heel’. But I can imagine Eve turning to Adam, when their firstborn son appeared: “Let’s call him after your dad – he’d like that.” Or maybe she did and Adam said, “No boy of mine is going to get called Godfrey.” No, they had to invent a name. And they came up with ‘Cain’ which some say means ‘a spear’. Not the name I would’ve given my boy but then any name’s better than Adam which basically means ‘dirt’; what was God thinking? I guess he named the kid after the first thing he saw after the baby was born in the good ol’ Native American tradition:

A young Indian boy asks the Indian chief, “Grandfather why do all of us Indians have strange names?”

He replies, “Well son in the dawn of the day into which the young is born, the Indian brave will leave his teepee. The first thing he sees will be the name of his young. Like your sister, Running Deer, the first thing your father saw was a running deer and your brother Flying Eagle, the first thing your father saw was a flying eagle. Now do you understand me, Two Dogs Fucking?”

So I guess it could’ve been worse: his brother (Abel) was called ‘Vapour’.

Every now and then some poor kid gets a novel name. And I don’t mean naming them after the FA Cup winners that year or something daft like that, although it has been done. I’m thinking of all the kids like Kal-el Coppola Cage, Nicolas Cage's first baby with his wife Alice Kim (Kal-El is Superman’s birth name); Sage Moonblood Stallone and his brother Seargeoh; Jermaine Jackson’s kid, Jermajesty and glamour model Jordan’s daughter, Princess Tiaamii. There’s a list in The Times of the 50 craziest celebrity baby names and no sign of Zowie Bowie (actually Duncan Zowie Haywood Jones) or Rolan Bolan (full name, Rolan Seymour Feld). Moon Unit Zappa was there though.

Celebrities are not the only culprits. According to the BBC website:

· A study discovered that 7,261 girls have been called Kylie, with another 288 named Madonna.

· But film characters also proved a hit with six babies named Gandalf after the wizard from Lord of the Rings, and two lucky boys given the name Superman.

· Thirty-six sets of parents called their child Arsenal after the football team.

· Sporting legend Tiger Woods has also made his mark with 1,200 boys named after him - or the animal.

· And some kids didn't escape being branded - with the names Reebok and Adidas cropping up too.

Of course, if you don’t like your name there’s always the option to change it to something more appropriate, like the Glastonbury teenager, one George Garratt, who changed his name to Captain Fantastic Faster Than Superman Spiderman Batman Wolverine Hulk And The Flash Combined. He did it online for £10.00.


His grandmother is apparently no longer speaking to him. In Italy, a couple was banned from naming their son Friday - Venerdi - because the name could expose him to ridicule (the court ordered the boy's name be changed to Gregorio, named after the saint's day on which he was born); conversely a judge in New Zealand made a young girl a ward of court so she could change her name from Talula Does The Hula From Hawaii to something sensible. In New Zealand again, a couple was banned from naming their baby 4Real, so they chose Superman instead.

Names are important:

One particularly suggestive study, done in 1954, looked at 1,682 case histories of children treated in a mental health clinic in New Jersey. Boys with unusual first names (names that occurred only once or twice among the group of children) were more likely to have moderate or severe emotional disturbance, compared with boys with more common names. (The same effect was not found among the girls in the clinic, however.)

[...]

In another study ... sixth-graders' self-concept--how effective, attractive, and valued they felt--was related to the desirability of their first names. Moreover, children with desirable first names scored higher on a standardized test of academic achievement. One possible interpretation is that teachers expect children with more popular names to do better and so, over time, those positive expectations translate into actual higher levels of achievement. – Robert Needlman, ‘Names and Personality’

Once we’ve managed to screw up our kids for life there are plenty of other things we can name, like flowers (if we breed a new one) or stars (if we find a new one). Lily Allen has a flower named after her (a lily of course) as does the Welsh singer Duffy (‘the Duffydill’); Maria Callas and Katherine Jenkins have also had flowers named after them. As for stars, there’s a website (who says the web is not a dangerous place?) where, for a measly £49.95, the International Star Registry will select on your behalf a star from a constellation visible over the relevant Hemisphere so that you can see it with the aid of a telescope. You can, however, choose the constellation yourself:

For example, if someone particularly likes cats or horses, they may be especially pleased to have a star named after them in the constellation of Lynx - "the Cat" or Pegasus - "the Winged Horse"!

Starname.net’s prices start at a bargain $19.95.

Obviously a lot of satisfaction can be had from naming something. But clearly there are consequences to giving something a wrong or inappropriate name. (Ever heard A Boy Named Sue?) Should you be able to hear or look at a name a glean something from it? When is a name more than a label?

There are rules of nomenclature certainly as far as the sciences go but most of us aren’t scientists, besides a lot of time the names scientists pick are pretty obvious: horny backed toad, black hole – that shows a real lack of imagination. That doesn’t mean the rest of can’t make up our own arbitrary rules. There are rules for naming racehorses, for example. In an interview Jockey Club registrar Rick Bailey explained:

We have a limitation of exactly 18 characters, and there are some special permissions that you have to get, for example, so that if you wanted to name a horse after a person, you would need to seek written permission from that person. One of the best ones that I remember in my 17 years here at the Jockey Club is, several years back, we had a filly named Barbara Bush when Mrs. Bush was still first lady at the time. We received a letter of permission on White House letterhead. So that was pretty exciting. – ‘The Science of Naming a Racehorse’, NPR

Cheering on a horse called ‘Barbara Bush’ feels as daft to me as looking up at the sky at a speck of light called, ‘Tom Baker’ . (Yes, there is one. When asked how he felt about having a star named after him, his response was: "I'm over the moon!")

Of course neither the horse nor the star care what we call it. My mother had no imagination when it came to naming her cats: her black cats were called Blackie and Sooty; the white one was called Snowy; the ginger one, Tigger; the one that looked like Tom from Tom and Jerry, Tom; the black and white one, Minstrel and the big one, Biggie, because he had no other distinguishing feature. I have a goldfish called Fishy and a cockatiel named Poirot but who gets called ‘Birdie’. And the slugs are all called ‘Sluggie’.

There is another way we get to name things. Take the new bridge across the Clyde, the Clyde Arc. No one calls it that.


It’s known colloquially as ‘the Squinty Bridge’, owing to its diagonal path across the Clyde. Or Dublin’s ‘Monument of Light’ which gets called ‘the Spike’ because that’s exactly what it is, a spike 350ft tall. When my daughter was a kid she used to meet her mates at ‘the big pointy thing’ which was a local monument. When I was her age I used to meet my mates at ‘the green bridge.’ The thing was there were actually two green bridges and even when the local council painted it blue it was still ‘the green bridge’. We like names that make sense or are familiar. And this is especially true within families.

Everyone knows about dialects but have you ever heard the expression oikolect before? It was a new one on me until a while ago when my wife introduced me to it. Whereas an idiolect is a form of a language spoken by an individual as distinct from a group, class, or nation, an oikolect is a language spoken by a household.

eco-, oeco-, oec-, oiko-, oik- (Greek: house, household affairs [environment, habitat], home, dwelling; used in one extensive sense as, “environment”).

I’m sure if you think about it you’ll be able to think of a few words that your family define in a unique way. I’ll give you a good example: when I was a kid my parents had two downstairs rooms apart from the kitchen, the one at the front of the house (the one kept for good) was ‘the front room’, the other room, the one we lived in (which you would imagine would have been referred to as ‘the living room’) was actually called ‘the house’. My wife even has a poem called ‘A Room Called House’.

Another expression that I think was unique to my family was the word ‘cornish’ to refer to a mantelpiece. I have no idea where that originated. Kitchen stools were ‘buffetts’. I’m guessing as to the spelling but I need to distinguish them from the word ‘buffet’.

A woman I knew told me about bringing her newborn son home – she already had a daughter of about three at the time – and as she had the child on the table her daughter was getting in the way taking way too much interest in the proceedings, anyway, when the nappy came off the little girl looked at her little brothers genitalia and announced: “Mummy! John’s got a pom-pom on his bottom.” From that day on the familial euphemism for the private parts of males became ‘pommie’.

My wife and I have a few expressions that are unique to our own household. An annoyingly effuse (and generally not very bright) girl is ‘a Tracey’ after a girl I used to work with. ‘Decoder ring poems’ is an expression we coined for poems that only make sense once you have a key piece of information that you could not possibly glean from the poem itself. Her poem ‘A Room Called House’ is a decoder ring poem. Its true meaning is indiscernible without knowing about my family’s oikolect. One I remember from when I was a teenager was referring to a perm as ‘a frizzbomb’ and that stuck for a while.

Sometimes I deliberately missay words just for the fun of it: tevelision (television), deaf and tootly (definitely), bumbershoot (umbrella). I’m not sure if they count but I suspect they do because my family know not to correct me and it’s only certain words. I personally think it’s a way of compensating for being serious so much of the time. It’s the same with the bird. I talk to the bird all the time and also do his responses which include a number of words of ‘his’ own invention: dogs become ‘doggie-birds’; my daughter is ‘blonde bird’ (not sure why since she’s not actually blonde); singing has become ‘singering’; twittering, ‘twitification’; screaming, ‘noiseification’; his treats (which are square cuboids) and simply called ‘square things’ to differentiate them from his regular food which are ‘round things’ (actually they’re cylindrical) and so on. He also has a tendency to slip into a Northern accent.

Next time: idioglossia, neologisms, gobbledegook, gibberish, Unwinese, inflationary English, argots, textese, twitterspeak, sniglets, abbreviationese, protologisms, nonce words, nicknames, pet names, euphemisms and acronyms. I think that covers it all.