Coinages of the Realm

(Image by Flicker user Payton Chung)

I’m calling it neolohunger: the yearning—to which Calvin Trillin recently confessed in The New York Times and from which I also suffer—to, in Trillin’s words, “slip a phrase into the language.”

The phrase he holds up for envy is Tom Brokaw’s “the greatest generation,” referring to those who fought World War II and went on to rebuild America and Europe. Indeed, the phrase is now instantly familiar, even to those who don’t consider that generation to be so very great. For me, the gold ring was nabbed by Stephen Colbert when he came up with truthiness, which went on to become the 2005 Word of the Year.

Note that we’re not talking here, strictly speaking, about coinage. Surely someone had called some group of people the greatest generation before Brokaw, and Ben Zimmer pointed out the earlier origins of truthiness when Colbert’s star rose in the neologistic firmament. Nor are we talking necessarily about stamping a phrase with your own name, like the much-debated Reuben sandwich. We’re talking about getting the word or phrase into common parlance, such that its first mainstream use starts with you, and you sort of disappear into the woodwork.

If Trillin had come to me with his candidates before broadcasting them in the Times, I would not have given him good odds. His first contestant in the neologism race was Sabbath gasbags, referring to people who pontificate on Sunday-morning talk shows. A Google Ngram shows gasbag peaking in 1942, when Trillin was 6 years old, and declining precipitously since then. Moreover, we already have the term talking heads, which admittedly began as a type of TV shot and doesn’t fit easily with radio talkers (their heads being sort of beside the point). But you don’t get the sense that Sabbath gasbags fills a hitherto unspecified need.

His other offerings amounted to initialisms, which in my experience are a long shot. Tennis players, for instance, often start a friendly game with “First Ball In,” or FBI, rather than practicing serves before the match starts. When a friend of mine started calling out “First Ball In, Both Sides,” meaning she wanted to claim the right to as many faults as needed on both deuce and ad service sides at the start of the match, I tried slipping “FBI BS” into the weekend-player lexicon, but got nowhere.

By contrast, the folks at the Milwaukee airport, as Lingua Franca reader Ben Rosenberg recently pointed out, have a fine contender at the starting post with their Recombobulation Area, designed for travelers to put themselves back together after being discombobulated by airport security. Discombobulate is itself a “jocular alteration,” according to the OED, of discomfit or discompose, but it does seem logical to saw off the prefix and replace it with one that undoes the harm. I doubt that the root term, as expressed in Urban Dictionary’s definition of recombobulate as “What you do in order to become combobulated after becoming discombobulated,” will go quite so viral. But recombobulating seems an activity just waiting to be undertaken, and not only by travelers.

My two chief neolohungers come from children’s phrases. When my younger son was 4, he resisted bedtime mightily. We’d say, “OK, time’s up,” and he would insist, “No! Time’s down!” Exactly, I think, what we all need on a perfect summer day—for time to be down. And if we decide we’d prefer an air-conditioned movie to the evening picnic we’d planned, I like the way a friend’s granddaughter phrases it: “I’ve switched my mind.” Something more forceful, there, than changing one’s mind, something that evokes a swerve from one track to another rather than pure caprice.

So those are my candidates. World, are you listening? And you neolohungry people, what are you longing to slip into the mainstream?

(Image from Flicker user Payton Chung)