A “neologism” is a newly coined word or expression. My last post addressed my desire for a couple of new words. I received surprisingly few recommendations from you. Perhaps you’re still thinking. It isn’t easy to coin a new word.
But it’s not so hard to change one letter of a existing word. The example I often use to illustrate the concept is “sarchasm,” which is defined as the gulf between the speaker of sarcastic wit and the listener who doesn’t get it. The term appeals to me in part because of how often my own comments get lost in that figurative ravine. I tend to believe it’s the listener’s fault, my wife assures me that the fault lies in the speaker.
Through the years, I have mentioned this concept to many people, each time describing it as an annual competition run by the Washington Post. Alas, my memory was roughly half right. The Post actually runs a weekly contest, called the Style Invitational. The contest is not limited to neologisms. For instance, the very first Style Invitational, in March 1993, challenged readers to select a less offensive name for Washington’s football team. The winner chose “the Baltimore Redskins,” suggesting that the simplest way to address the issue was to make it someone else’s problem. Cleveland tried that once with the Browns – and then went out of its way to resurrect the problem.
The Style invitational has taken on a life of its own. According to Wikipedia, a group of devotees holds an annual awards dinner. One devotee won the contest so often that he inspired a contest to decide what to do about him. It did not have the desired result, he won that contest as well.
Winning the contest or merely having your entry mentioned is called getting ink. Several people have exceeded 1,000 inks. I have none. I like to think this is largely because I haven’t submitted any entries, that I could have ink if I tried.
“Sarchasm” by Tom Witte won Style Invitational Week 278 in 1998. I saw the non-word on the internet, where it was part of a list of other witty neologisms. The Post is credited with that list, but disclaims it. https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/the-style-invitational-goes-viral/2013/02/28/74a76fac-77a3-11e2-95e4-6148e45d7adb_story.html?utm_term=.6c2b59df307b
The son of my college roommate embraced the concept upon hearing about it. Here are two of his ideas:
Carcolepsy – condition of a person in the passenger seat who falls asleep as soon as the car begins moving, and
Celfish – adjective to describe people who focus too much on their cell phones.
Here are a few other examples of Style Invitational contests gleaned from the Post, along with a representative example:
Bad analogies (week 120): The lamp just sat there, like an inanimate object.
Change a movie title without changing any letters (1195): La-la-land, a man overcomes his insecurities stemming from a stutter to become an air traffic controller. (by Brian Cohen, Winston-Salem, N.C.)
Sometime in 1998, new meaning for an existing word: Coffee: a person who is coughed upon. (David Hoffman)
This is an endless rabbit hole as the Post crests Week 1200 — too many weeks, too many contests, too many funny lines. So I’ll close with two winning neologisms from the 2014 WPM (word play masters) Invitational:
Meanderthal – a lazy ancestor known for wandering around doing nothing while others hunted and gathered, and
Luxurinate – using a really nice restroom
http://www.washingtonpostsmensainvitational.com/2014-submissions/
I welcome any submissions you might have. If you want to win a prize, often described as “a strange, weird thing that few people would want,” you should submit to the Washington Post.
What a thoroughly enjoyable post. I have a question and a statement.
First the question:
Is there a word where Neologism can be twisted so that it isn’t a word that is coined, but rather a new meaning. More specifically I mean the Reinvention of a word, or that word’s meaning. By Reinventing I mean that it returns a general understanding of a word’s definition to its older and original usage. (Reinventing – see what I did there As in Inventing It Again?) If there isn’t such a word maybe we could create something like Ol’ogism. Returning the meaning of a word to it’s original intent.
For example we could change the meaning of Redskins. Why would we possibly need to replace this word when we can change what it means to it’s original usage.
Statement:
As I understand it, ‘Redskin’ is a term that was originally used to describe the white men whom the native Americans interacted with. These new people had no pigment in their skin and as a result, fear and coldness expressed themselves in the form of expanded blood vessels in the face, and the white men would turn red. Thus the term ‘Red Skins’.
All we need to do is to remove the tomahawks and Mohicans as depictions of Indians, and change the icon into a slightly overweight, white male fan carrying beer and snacks. He could be blushing from exertion from running to the fridge without missing a play. The team could have that be the new representative of the sports team in question.
It’s an Iconographic Ol’ogism.
No better way to celebrate fans by honoring the fans themselves as the mascot.
Unless some of the fans are not white, at which point the team is now excluding those people (kind of), but the team has already shown a willingness to marginalize some people for the sake of the team, so we know they don’t really care.
– so we’re all good!
I think the Yankees have you covered. Not necessarily overweight, but definitely white. I like the image you created.
Ha! I particularly like sarchasm and Baltimore Redskins.
I have a friend who calls me Spillster or Spillip for my proclivity of making large gestures and spilling his beer.
Spillip is perfect for you. Your father sent me an email explaining a term that he and his church members used in the 60s. “Rurban” described the church, which was comprised mostly of people who lived in a rural area but worked in the nearest sizable town.