Saturday, November 22, 2008

Is there a neologism meaning "a new word"?


I hope they show the time where they traded guns to the Indians for
corn, and then the Indians shot them and took the corn.
-- Bart Simpson, watching "Young Jebediah Springfield"


So the Collins Dictionary has decided to include the word "meh" in its forthcoming edition. "Meh", which sounds vaguely Yiddish to me, has its roots in a Simpsons episode. It's an interjection ("What's wrong?" "Meh. Nothin' really") or an adjective (turnout for the McCainFest was sort of meh) - the written equivalent of a shoulder shrug.


The writers of the Simpsons have been spackled with glory before. Now that the word "cromulent" is so prominent in our everyday parlance, it's interesting to recall that it didn't even exist before the Lisa the Iconoclast episode (1996). The students are watching a film about the glory days of their hometown's founder, Jebediah Springfield, and we hear this:


Jebediah: [on film] A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man.


to which Bart's teacher, Ms Krabapple, says:


Edna: Embiggens? I never heard that word before I moved to Springfield



Ms.Hoover: I don't know why. It's a perfectly cromulent word.


(It should be noted that the teachers are smoking cigarettes in the classroom while the kids watch the glorified adventures of their town's namesake.)


So from that spark arose the flame, and now the word cromulent is in several dictionaries, meaning valid or acceptable. And of course, that means that cromulent isn't really cromulent!


Listen, it's just not the Joes (Six-Pack and Plumber) out there realizing that The Simpsons have not only helped to form our culture, but our language, as well. Mark Liberman, director of the Linguistic Data Consortium, says, "The Simpsons has apparently taken over from Shakespeare and the Bible as our culture's greatest source of idioms, catchphrases and sundry other textual allusions."

I ripped off that quote from Wikipedia, but don't have a cow, man!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Do'h! I really enjoyed this. I enjoy anything when it relates to the Simpsons! Love that Bart!!

Ralph said...

Good one! I don't really think of "meh" and "d'oh!" as neologisms so much as just spelled-out versions of sounds we use all the time to express something. I guess technically they are "new words," though, because they started out as just sounds, and now they're being spelled out, word-like. I haven't seen or heard "meh" used as an adjective ("sort of meh.") More as a reaction, like, "So, what do you think?" "Meh."

Pandora's Aquarium said...

meh.