Word up

LITTLE ROCK — “Ooh! Ooh! I made up a new word.”

Sounds brainy, huh? The sort of excitement we associate with the freckled and bespectacled, perhaps the yearbook crew. The sort, in short, we mock.

But you don’t have to be a taxonomist to feel glee at a new locution, or yearn for a word that means “cheating” and “morally justified.” Why, don’t you think the guy who coined “razzmatazz” got a round of back slaps from his mates when that rhyme came skipping from his lips?

Making up a word is as fresh a thrill as watching your child thrash the schoolyard bully.

In fact, there’s a word for the sensation one gets following a neologism - “neologasm.” Now, you’ll only find it in the ... URBAN DICTIONARY

The low-rent wiki for slang enthusiasts boasts about 4.5 million entries and has become truly a taxonomic farm system for establishment word banks such as Merriam-Webster and Oxford American. The latter’s most recent Word of the Year - “unfriend” - was fairly accurately defined five years earlier on the online Urban Dictionary, by someone with the handle “yougotOwn3d”: “The act of removing people from your ‘friends list.’”

Unfortunately, “YougotOwn3 d”continues on in a way that separates her from America’s elite wordsmiths: “[It’s] just to let them know you hate them, and you hope they die. In fact, you don’t just hate them and hope that they die, but you hope they die a long, slow, painful, gut-wrenching death. Preferably in a Turkish prison that is overrun with skin-eating mutant leeches.”

Urban Dictionary - there’s no editing, no fact checking. A word is submitted to the gatekeepers, who simply accept it or reject it, without modification or explanation. From there your word, your definition and your use in a sentence are voted on by casual viewers. “Crowdsourced,” linguist Nancy Frishberg of the Linguistic Society of America calls it. Then the entries are arranged according to approving responses.

Some terms (“cromulent,” “crunk”) are new utterances, while others are portmanteaus (“cyberchondriac,” “chillaxing”). The largest agglomeration, however, is common words newly defined or newly combined to describe previously unnamed phenomena.

Here are 2009’s highlights:

Face base: The point in a romantic relationship when pictures of the couple begin to appear on Facebook.

Vulture capitalist: A businessman who is looking to buy companies at giveaway prices, as opposed to venture capitalist.

To your point: Phrase used to contradict another person’s ideas while making it feel like you have agreed with them.

Impactful: Coined by corporate advertising, marketing and business drones to make their work sound far more useful, exciting and beneficial to humanity than it really is. This term is most frequently used in “team building” seminars and conferences.

No motion: A promotion without a raise or bonus.

Mascary: When a person wears a scary amount of mascara.

Good hang: Someone who is fun to hang out with.

Keyboarding: The oldfashioned way to communicate.

Hand me up: The young generation in a family adopts and purchases new technology at a fast rate, and old versions of that technology are passed along to parents or older generations.

Running latte: Showing up late to work because you stopped for coffee along the way.

Hiking the Appalachian Trail: To step out on one’s wife, in the fashion of adulterous South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford.

Holla: A word used to acknowledge the presence of a fellow companion.

Tooth sweater: When you go for a day or so without brushing your teeth, and the texture in your mouth feels like your teeth are wearing fuzzy little sweaters.

Reader’s block: Related to writer’s block, this is when you cannot for the life of you pick up a book and read it.

Recessionista: A person who is able to stick to a tight budget while still managing to dress stylishly.

Birthers: Conspiracy theorists who contend President Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States.

Deathers: Conspiracy theorists who believe the Democratic health-care overhaul is a ruse to kill senior citizens and fetuses.

Thanksgiving beard: An unintentional beard started over the four-day Thanksgiving weekend, but usually continued until Christmas or New Year’s Day.

Elf-esteem: The feeling of being overworked, underappreciated and like you don’t exist to others during the holidays, while in actuality the season’s success depends on you.

THE TEN

The Web site Urban Dictionary recently celebrated its 10th anniversary. “Define your world,” it challenges us, and so we try.

Take the word “bones.” Bones are the building blocks of our skeleton. They are alsomusical sticks in a minstrel show. The word “bone” may also refer to a shade of white.

Inside Urban Dictionary, there are fully 36 entries for “bones,” a figure that pales beside some vulgar terms (the word “boobs” has a modest 86 entries, ending ignominiously with “things on a woman’s upper area lower than her neck.”).

The best Urban Dictionary definition of “bones” is “dollars, $,” followed by the game of dominoes, cigarettes and the television show of the same name. Seventh is this definition, strangely authoritative in this context: “What holds your body together along with muscles and tendons. They are part of a massed structure knownas a skeleton.”

Other clever entries include “cave man currency, Jurassic dollars”; piano keys; and “pizza crust left over from someone who does not eat the crust.”

The very last entry is “guy’s hipbones” - [ squiggly-faced emoticon] - but there you have it.

“Bones.” Thirty-six entries. OMG. Redonkulous.

END OF THE AUGHTS

Congratulations! You survived the aughts - and extra congratulations if you knew that.

Oh, you lived them, and unless you were too big to go unbailed, it was an epic fail. The years 2000-09, they owned us. And all along we didn’t know what to call the decade (besides the partisan and pedestrian “Bush Years”).

These aughts, they were good for Urban Dictionary and amateur lexicography generally. Digital interconnection has given rise to an explosion of technomenclature, while instant messaging and texting have spawned anacronym nebula to rival the intelligence community’s.

There’s the popular FML, “[Fie on] my life,” and its counterpoint, IFML, “I [fully] love my life”; NGL or “not gonna lie” (but he might) andTTYN, or “talk to you never” (but she will); the nihilistic SOML, “story of my life,” and the formalistic “kthxbi,” or “OK! Thanks! Bye!”

Kevin Kinder, writer for the recently christened Northwest Arkansas Newspapers and obsessive Twitterer, says his fave is FTW, or “for the win.” “It means a situation is going to turn out excellently. Example: ‘Tonight is our office Christmas party. Free booze. FTW!’ or ‘Love me some deep dish pizza. Damgoode Pies. FTW!’”

In fact, it seems like the only thing swelling at the same rate as our unemployment rolls is our language. But several linguists participating in the online forum “The Linguist List” say that what seems like a trope surge is just a normal birth rate given an abnormally high profile.

“I would comment that even if one found an ‘explosion’ of new entries arriving in dictionaries in the last few years, it is not at all obvious that this would tell us thatsomething new was happening in the language itself,” says Geoffrey Sampson at the University of Sussex.

Anthea Fraser Gupta at the University of Leeds notes that an examination of the dates of first citation in the Oxford English Dictionary reveals a great peak of new verbiage in the 17th century as a great many scientific words were translated from the Latin, but more than the volume of new words was their proof in print:

“Closer examination reveals that the peaks coincide with patterns in publishing that simply reveal words that were probably being used for years ... were not used in books mined ... by OED.”

In other words, surges in cataloged language have corresponded with their usage in widely read books, years after their proliferation on “the street.” The Internet is the nexus of these two media, andit has accelerated the process.

“A dictionary can be only as good as the evidence available to the compilers,” agrees Sampson, “and there is obviously far more evidence available about informal ‘street’ usage nowadays than there used to be. The usage of previous centuries is typically inferred from the writings of distinguished authors, because their output is most of what we have. Nowadays, any teenager can put material out on the Internet, and they do. So ... lexicographers find more new usages for the present age.”

Speaking of the present, the new year needs a name. Currently, neither “The Ten” or “MMX” has been claimed on the UD.

Go ahead. Define your year.

Since first contemplating this story, reporter Bobby Ampezzan submitted “technomenclature” to Urban Dictionary under the handle “Arkansas Bobby.” The word mash-up was accepted by the site’s editors and posted on Dec. 18. At press time, it had not received a single vote up or down.