CHAPTER 4.

BASE-CREATING WORD BUILDING MECHANISMS

Main issues A. Coining B. Nonce formations C. Eponymy D. Toponymy Learning objectives By the end of this chapter you will be able to: define coin through its lexicological meaning describe wordsmiths ways of creating new words discuss and illustrate the phenomena of eponymy and toponymy Introduction The English vocabulary is enriched not only by borrowing words from other languages or from the updating of older words. The creative force of the human mind has devised other procedures intended to create new words, which are generically called coining or inventing methods. Within these generic denominations, several word-creating methods will be described. They consider the ability of writers, translators and scientists to construct new words in the most imaginative way, simply by randomly choosing letters which joined together result in words. Words may be tailored as hybrids which weld foreign or native words with foreign or native affixes into new lexical structures. Since biblical times proper names were attributed to places or to tribes or groups of people, and this recycling of the personal name to refer to common nouns seems to become a word-creating solution. This chapter looks into the resourcefulness of word-creators and their word-creating mechanisms. Coining Definition The term was introduced in the English vocabulary in the 14th century, and it was first used with its general meaning; beginning with the 17th century, it was used in this sense. This term is used either to designate the process of linguistic inventing or the result of this inventing, the word or the phrase, respectively. Like loan and borrowing, the term coinage is based on an ancient analogy between language and money. The creation of words without the use of earlier words is rare, for ex. googol, the term for the number 1 followed by a hundred zeros or 10100 introduced by the American mathematician Edward Kasner, whose 9-year-old nephew coined it when asked to think up a name for a very big number. The creation of words out of nowhere has still been a widely used practice which

CHAPTER 4. some lexicographers did consider in their dictionary compiling projects. Nevertheless, according to Algeo (1993), successful coinages are the exception unsuccessful ones are the rule, because the human impulse to creative playfulness produces more words than a society can sustain. Based on their success, i.e., that of being accepted as part of a dictionary list, coinages may be grouped into three distinct sorts of lexical isolates and coinages proper. Lexical isolates David Crystal (2000: 219) discusses a large category of invented words under the distinction lexical isolates which actually includes hapax legomena nonce-formations and a certain type of neologisms, the bonce-formations. These are items spontaneously created by a speaker or writer to meet the immediate needs of a particular communicative situation, and therefore, they have a transient and pragmatic character, obvious in their OED describing them to be used for the time being, temporarily. The first group of coinages, the hapax legomena, (<Greek, thing that is said only once) refers to the items recorded only once in an authors work, a literary genre, or even a literature as a whole. Crystal ( 219) mentions that because of the limited insight into the historical contemporary linguistic norms, it is usually unclear whether a hapax found in a corpus is (a) a regular part of the lexicon (which just happened never to have been recorded elsewhere), or (b) an error (where there was no intention on the authors part of using it again elsewhere, or where there was no intention on the authors part of using it in the first place). Nonce-formations (or nonce-words) are items spontaneously coined by a speaker or writer to meet the immediate needs of a particular communicative situation (Crystal 2000: 218). They may be grouped into:
i) ii)

iii) Although these examples were created for a special communicative situation, many other words built on the same pattern which first occurred as nonce words were gradually assimilated by the English speaking community (for example, workaholic and chocoholic). Unlike hapax legomena, nonceformations are deliberately-coined words made on the spur of the moment with no intention on their creators part to have them included in the native language lexicon. Bonce-formations (< bonce = head, in Brit. Slang) are those lexical items newly proposed for technical status within a specialized domain. This is a borderline category of coinages which are nonce-like because they are being used for the first time to solve an immediate problem of communication within a single writing event. On the other hand, they are neologistic because they are being proposed with future standardized status in mind (Crystal 2000: 218). They are typical of academic writing, but not restricted only to it.
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facetious puns (such as chopaholic, i.e., one who likes lamb chops) momentary lexical gap-fillers (for example, cyberphobic) rhetorical anomalies (unsad to be contrasted with sad)

BASE-COINING WORD BUILDING MECHANISMS Lexical isolates, as practice has shown, may have remained recorded as nonce- or bonce-formations or they may have been accepted as an integral part of the contemporary English lexicon. Coinages (or created words) In his book, Our Mother Tongue. The English Language, Bill Bryson (1980: 69) says that words seemingly spring from nowhere. For centuries the word in English was hound (or hund), when suddenly in the late Middle Ages, dog, a word etymologically unrelated to any other known word, displaced it. No one has any idea why. Among words with unknown pedigree are: jaw, bad, jam, big, gloat, fun, crease, etc. From Brysons words, coinages seem to come from nowhere; this holds true for a certain number of words, but coinages may be the result of various linguistic contributions as well. Who were these contributors? Jespersen (1982: 147) answered this question as early as 1938, in his book Growth and Structure of the English Language, where he discussed the contribution of two categories of word-creators. The former was created from the need of tradespeople to designate new articles of merchandise. Very little regard is generally paid to correctness of formation, the only essential being a name that is good for advertising purposes. Sometimes a mere arbitrary collection of sounds or letters is chosen, as in the case of Kodak. Sometimes the inventor contends himself with some vague resemblance to some other word, which may assist the buyer to remember the name. Many such names are very short lived, but some are there to stay and may even pass into common use outside the sphere for which they were originally invented. Professionals who come from diverse fields of activity have contributed with lexical creations. They have used various means of making new words, as follows: - combinations of Latin/Greek words with Latin affixes: papilionaceous (<Latin papilion, crude form, of papilio, a butterfly) and aceous; correlate (<Latin cor-, together and relate); obstiction (obligation, < Latin obstrictus, pp of stringere = to bind, to fasten); - foreign word and Latin affix: interloper (an intruder, a runner between, from Latin inter-, between and Dutch looper, a runner from loopen, to run) - English prefix + foreign word: belabour (be- English prefix + labour) - associations of letters which are randomly arranged to produce words: golliwog (fanciful invented name for a black-faced doll, 19th century creation), kodak (arbitrary word invented by George Eastman as a trademark, patented in 1888), nylon (invented name of a strong plastic material used for yarn, etc. 20th century) - imitations of already existing words - use of already existing words/parts of words, with new meanings (doddered, 12th century, used after Dryden, of old oaks that have lost the top or branches; alt. form simulating a p.p. of doddard < dod: poll, top, of unknown origin); In terms of coiners, etymological dictionaries include in this category
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CHAPTER 4. scientists and authors of literature. Since the main interest falls on lexemes, special emphasis will be laid on the result of the coining. Therefore, coinages may be simple words (nylon, Dada, potash), derivatives, hybrids (galumph, invented by Lewis Carroll, from gallop and triumphant) or combinations of words borrowed from the classical languages and words of English extraction. Our classification is based on the proponents of coinages and consists of two such groups of contributors: names of literary fame and names of scientific reputation. Words created by writers Not many of the English writers have acquired the fame of word creators, but of the few mention will be made of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Thomas Morus and Ben Johnson. Shakespeare is among the first writers who produced new words. The words Shakespeare fathered are described by Crystal(1999: 35), in a series of eight articles under the eponymous form of Williamisms a term the author confesses to have invented especially for the magazine Grounding-O, to mean a word which appears for the first time in English in one of Shakespeares plays, which is more specific than the general and rather vague Shakespearism, in use since the early ninetheenth-century to mean any form of expression peculiar to or imitated from Shakespeare in January 1997, when the linguist admitted embarking upon the exploration of the Shakespearean terminology and its creative aspects. According to apparently careful calculations, Shakespeare used 17,677 words in his writings, of which at least one tenth had never been used before. Shakespeare lived in an age when new words and ideas burst upon the world as never before or since. For a century and a half, from 1500 to 1650, English flowed with new words. Between10,000 and 12,000 words were coined, of which about half still exist. Not until modern times would this number be exceeded, but even then, there is no comparison. Shakespeare alone gave gust, hint, hurry, lonely summit, pedant, obscene, barefaced, critical, leapfrog, monumental, castigate, majestic, frugal, radiance, dwindle, countless, submerged, excellent, fretful. Jespersen notes that some 200 to 300 words are found in the early plays that are never repeated. Many of these were provincialisms that he later shed, but which independently made their way into the language later among them cranny, beautiful, homicide, aggravate and forefathers. It has also been observed by scholars that the new terms of his younger years appeal directly to senses (snow-white, fragrant, brittle), while the coinages of the later years are more concerned with psychological considerations. Many words did not last, but Shakespeares gloomy or brisky, made it. In the 17th century, macaronic (applied to burlesque verse in which vernacular words are mingled with Latin in a Latinized form) was popularized by Teofilo Folengo, who described his verses as a literary analogue of macaroni (a gross, rude and rustic mixture of flour, cheese, and butter).
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BASE-COINING WORD BUILDING MECHANISMS T.S.Coleridge, in his Biographia Literaria, published in 1817, introduced the form of a new verb, to intensify, in the text saying that the will itself by confining and intensifying the attention may arbitrarily give vividness or distinctness to any object whatsoever. He added a footnote to justify his coinage, asserting that the earlier use of intend in this sense had become confusingly ambiguous and that the periphrastic render intense would ruin the beautiful harmony of his sentence, although he admits that the new words sound uncouth to my own ear. The word was well established by the middle of the 19th century, and Coleridges other and more arguably uncouth coinage esemplastic has found a niche in the language. Yet, it was this same coiner, who in 1832 attacked talented as a vile and barbarous vocable apparently believing that it was not proper to form an adjective from a noun and the suffix -d (although he is not known to have objected to skilled, bigoted, or any other adjective formed according to this pattern). The pattern verb + -ify was applied in the case of exemplify, too. Ben Jonson was not as prolific as Shakespeare, but, as a word creator, he is the author of the following terms: damp, defunct, clumsy, and strenuous. Sir Thomas Morus also contributed to the English lexicon with: absurdity, acceptance, exact, explain, and exaggerate. Sir Thomas Elyots contribution is illustrated by the literature of speciality with animate, exhaust, and modesty. The final examples come from Thomas Carlyle who coined decadent and environment and from G.B. Shaw whom few know as the author of the very frequently used term superman. Words created by scientists (biologists, mathematicians, physicists, etc.) Although etymological dictionaries describe an impressive number of creations put forward by men of science, in what follows very few cases have been selected in support of this idea. Sometimes words are made up for a specific purpose, and their authors are not known. The curious nautical terminology for its various features hatch, turret, hull, deck arises from the fact that it was developed by the British Admiralty rather than the Army. Thus, Pierre Gassendi, in 1621, suggested the syntagm aurora borealis to name the luminous atmospheric phenomenon near the poles. The Belgian chemist Van Helmont (died A.D. 1644) invented two terms gas and blas; the latter did not come into use. He seems to have been thinking of the Dutch sheest, spirit, volatile fluid (English ghost) and of the Dutch blazen, to blow. The English mathematician and physicist Isaac Newton introduced the terms centrifugal, centripetal in the specialist terminology, while Sir Humphrey Davy, the English chemist, (1807) coined the name potassium monoxide to designate the metallic element which is the basis of potash. Jeremy Bentham (an early 18th century English jurist and philosopher) authored the term international. In 1869, Thomas Henry Huxley, the English biologist who felt the need of a label for his own philosophical viewpoint, created the word agnostic (one
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CHAPTER 4. who holds the view that any ultimate reality is unknown and probably unworkable; broadly -one who doubts the existence of God (<Greek agnostos unknown / unknowable). Some years later he wrote It came into my head as suggestively antithetic to the gnostic of church history, who professed to know so much about the very things of which I was ignorant. To my great satisfaction the term took. (Longman, 1991: 31) Alfred Nobel launched, in the 19th century, the term dynamite a chemical substance (<Gr. dunamis force) + -ite. During the same 19th century, in 1865, C.F.Zincken created Kainite (from the Greek kains, new and the suffix ite), to name hydros chlorosulphate of magnesium and potassium. The South African statesman Jan Christiaan Smuts proposed holism (a view of the universe, especially living nature, as composed od interacting wholes that are more than the mere sum of their parts; broadly any view that emphasizes the organic or functional relation between members of a larger whole) which he introduced it in his book Holism and Evolution (1926) Both matter and life consist, in the atom and cell, of unit structures whose ordered grouping produces the natural wholes which e call bodies or organisms. This character or feature of wholeness points to something fundamental in the universe Holism is the term here coined to designate this fundamental factor operative towards the making or creation of wholes in the universe(Longman, 1991: 753). According to Otto Jespersen (1982: 148), the Great War (1914-1918) left its mark on language go west was used as an euphemism for die, be lost .The war even produced a new numeral umpteen, used to disguise the number of a brigade, later in the sense of a considerable number. The new words of today represent an explosion of technology words like lunar module, mydocardial infarction rather than of poetry and feeling. Eponymy Definition Eponymy is the means by which new words are created from names of persons. The proper name acting as the reference source is the base-eponym, and the resulting proper/common noun is the eponymous term or eponym. Since eponymy tends to expand its lexical contribution by the day, in what follows only few examples will be selected from the wealth of possibilities provided by over forty dictionaries of eponyms which have been published up to now. Classification of eponyms The criterion of this classification is the extraction or the background from which the person giving the name comes, or the contribution of the person to the world knowledge and parctice. The following groups of eponyms have been identified: 1. Base-eponyms related to religion: 1.1. Biblical names Jezebel, the infamous wife of Ahab, king of Israel, which was
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BASE-COINING WORD BUILDING MECHANISMS applied to shameless women, and Magdalene, which has acquired two different meanings (1) a reformed prostitute and (2) a house of refuge or reformatory for prostitutes (Websters New Collegiate Dictionary 1972:507). 1.2. Names of saints and monks were rather productive to denote membership to a certain religious order. Thus, the Athanasians were the followers of Athanasius, the 4th century archbishop of Alexandria, while the term Benedictine designates a member of the monk order founded at Monte Casino by Saint Benedict. 2. Base-eponyms as mythological names of Greek, Latin and Germanic origin: Hector, the leader and champion of the Trojans in the war against the Greeks came to mean braggard, while the verb to hector means to intimidate by blustering or scolding. Ceres the Roman goddess of grain and agriculture, there has been produced the adjective cereal of edible grain which originated in the Latin cerealis relating to the cultivation of grain. 3. Base-eponyms as names of kings famous for different features, situations or events: Croesus, an exceedingly rich king of Lydia is used in connection with any very rich person sometimes being part of the set phrase as rich as Croesus, while Gentius - the Illyrian king, gave his name to any of several plants having white, blue, yellow or red flowers. A king name is also used in medicine to describe the Caesarean cut, operation or section, namely Caesarotomy, practice due to which Caesar , the Roman Emperor is believed to have been born. Spelt not with a capital letter, the term is used to designate any powerful ruler (Websters New Collegiate Dictionary 1972:116). 4. Base-eponyms as names from literature further divide eponyms to originate into: 4.1. Names of literary heroes. A good example in case is that of Fagin, Dickenss hero, who describes an adult who instructs others (for example, children) in crime and especially theft or who receives stolen goods, especially from children (Longman 1991: 523). Lothario, the seducer in Nicholas Rowes play The Fair Penitent stands for a man whose chief interest is seducing women (Longman 1991: 942) and Scaramouch, the French comedy hero has come to be synonym with the compound neer-do-well. 4.2. Names of authors. They may be found in types of poems (a type of bacchanalian poem is the anacreontic stemming in the name of the Greek poet Anacreon, alcaics odes are the odes written in a special meter used by Alcaeus), or in abstract nouns which describe a personal imprint of an author (e. g. Ibsenism is a term used in advocacy of Ibsens style and social ideas). 5. Base-eponyms as names of personalities honoured for the services they brought to the community they were part of: 5.1. National heroes as Simon Bolivar, worshipped by the people he had liberated, gave his country not only its independence but its name as well. 5.2. To fully account for the name given to the two continents, North and South America, Marghidovici (1959: 218) wrote a whole chapter, whose conclusion was that the unanimously admitted name of Americo Vespucci represented a moment of human injustice. 5.3. Politicians, statesmen or even noblemen who set a fashion in their
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CHAPTER 4. time The Roman orator and statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero was so famous for his eloquence and knowledge that he typifies the two notions. His last name is nowadays used as a common noun, to denote a person who acts as a guide to sightseers and who wants to point out items of local interest to the visitors he is guiding. Earl Spencer, dead in 1845 who used to wear the spencer, a short overjacket, or of James Thomas Brudenell, the seventh Earl of Cardigan, British cavalryman of Crimean War fame, dead in 1868 (>cardigan - a knitted woolen sweater or jacket, collarless and open in the front), the English field marshall Fitzroy James Henry Somerset Raglan who used to wear a loose overcoat, the raglan, whose sleeves had a special cutting. The gallery of famous persons includes the name of the general surveyor of India and geographer, Sir George Everest who had his name attributed to the highest peak in the Himalayas, in honour of his having been the first to have reached on top of the world. 6. Base-eponyms as names of scientists represent, by far, the most productive group of base-eponyms. 6.1. (inventors) Thus, the U.S. artist and inventor Samuel Finley Breese Morse who devised the worldwide known and accepted Morse code, and Louis Braille, the French teacher of the blind who invented the braille system of writing or printing for the blind are just two examples. 6.2. (physicists) Among inventive scientists who provided simple eponyms, there should be included the names of Ampere (French physicist > ampere - a unit of electric current), Ohm (German physicist > ohm - unit of resistance), Langley (19th century American astronomer, whence the common noun to designate a unit of solar radiation), Watt (Scottish engineer and inventor > watt - the unit of power), next to many other mentioned by Hellweg (1995: 105). 6.3. (chemists) Names of chemical compounds include dolomite (< the name of the French geologist D. de Dolomieu, d. 1801), langbeinite (< the 19th century German chemist A. Langbein) and bakelite (< the Belgian-American inventor L.H. Baekeland, d. 1944) 6.4. (medicine) Medical practices applied by famous physicians as the Austrian Friedrich Anton Mesmer, who used to create a hypnotic state in a person described lexically as mesmerism, which is the result of the action expressed by the verb to mesmerize. A French physician who urged the use of a special device linked his name to it: J.J.Guillotin > the guillotine. 6.5. (botanists or admirers of plants) Passionate observers of the world they lived in, naturalists, botanists, gardeners and even diplomats named the plants they discovered with names related to their own. This is the case of the French patron of botany Michel Begon, who inspired another French botanist to name one flower (> begonia), or of Louis Antoine de Bougainville, the French navigator whose name was given to a flower (>bougainvillaea), or even that of the Swedish botanist Andreas Dahl (>dahlia), as well as that of Pierre Magnol, the professor of botany, who by his name denominate a large family of plants (>magnolia). The name of the German physician Heinrich Theodor Freese
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BASE-COINING WORD BUILDING MECHANISMS (d.1876) is the source of freesia, the ornamental sweet-scented South-African plants of the iris family, grown for their yellow, pink or white flowers. Another German botanist and physician Leonhard Fuchs (1501-66) who wrote a book on medicinal plants, De historia stirpium, was widely known an as a sign of admiration and respect, the French monk and botanist Charles Plumier named a genus of ornamental shrubs and herbs native to Central and South America and which have showy drooping deep red, purple, pink or white flowers Fuchsia. 7. (famous craftsmen) The vocabulary has also adopted the inventions of persons devoting their energy to other fields than that of exclusive science 7.1. (printers) The Italian publisher Aldo Manuzio and his family, famous both for the editions of Greek and Latin classics and for the aldine writing. 7.2. (carpenters) The English cabinet-maker and furniture designer Thomas Chippendale (1718-79) set up a furniture factory in London in 1749, and later on he became famous both in England and America through his furniture style, Chippendale. 7.3. (cooks) Madeleine Paulmier, a 19th century (French) pastry-cook, enriched the French gastronomy with a small rich cake the madeleine, the steward of Louis XIV, Louis de Bchamel invented a white cream sauce bchamel, and the cook of the French Csar de Choiseul, comte de PlessisPraslin invented a confection made by browning nuts, the praline. 7.4. (hatters) The Bowlers, a nineteenth-century family of London hatters, are supposed, according to some sources, to have produced the stiff felt hat which has a rounded crown and a narrow brim, the bowler. 7.5. ( weaponry inventors and producers) People also produced weapons as the gatling, the colt, and the winchester names derived from the American machine-gun or pistol inventors and/or manufacturers R.J. Gatling, Samuel Colt and Oliver Fisher Winchester, respectively. Toponymy To extend the investigation on proper names and by analogy with the assignment of new values to old words, as was the case with eponym, toponym may be interpreted to have three possible interpretations; thus they will be read so as to mean (a) a place-name, (b) the geographical place itself and (c) a new word so derived. Although very few verbs result from geographical names, an old practice was expressed by to shanghai (<Shanghai, town in China famous for the formerly widespread use of this method to secure sailors for voyages to the Orient): (a) to compel to join a ships crew by stupefying with drink and drugs; (b) to put in an awkward and unpleasant position by trickery. The noun and adjective Welsh is used as a verb to express two meanings, i.e., 1. to avoid payment and 2. to break ones word, not to keep ones promise. Nouns are richer and they include terms connected with sports, food (cheeses, biscuits), drinks, fabrics, breeds of animals and birds. From an extensive classification, the following were selected to outline an image about
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CHAPTER 4. the creativity of geographical names: Terms connected to sports: rugby, derby, Names of foods: cheddar, Brie, sardine, hamburger, frankfurter, Names of drinks: gin, cognac, champagne, Bordeaux, Porto, Madeira, Malaga, tequila, bourbon Names of fabrics and clothing: jersey, damask, nankeen, Holland, ulster, bikini, paramatta, cravat. Names of chemical elements: polonium, hafnium, berkelium, californium, americium, europium, etc. Toponyms represent a source for new words which has not been fully explored from the lexicological point of view. CONCLUSIONS This chapter described instances of linguistic creativity, based on pure inventiveness or on established patterns. The former group of words includes coinages, a term generically used to denote any type of lexical invention, purposefully produced to cover a lexical gap and nonce words. Nonce words are ephemeral lexical productions which sometimes happen to be adopted by the daily practice of language usage and become part of the lexicon. Among those words which are invented through combinations of letters/sounds to cover a speakers lexical gap Dada, was included here, since it is familiar to Romanians as a creation of a Romanian writer. English writers and scientists also crated words, and in most of the cases, their coinages were based on derivations with suffixes or prefixes. Such hybridizations of English or foreign words and English or Latin/Greek affixes include intensify and agnostic. There are also some coinages which are the result of random association of letters, such as nylon. The second half of the chapter deals with terms derived from proper nouns, which divide into names of persons and geographical names. Eponymy, which, sooner or later, will be considered as a resourceful means of creating new words, when the starting point is the name of a person, was envisaged from the perspective of the persons contributing to the lexical heritage. Without being an exhaustive presentation, the section on eponyms was intended only to outline a mapping of the contributors to the English vocabulary. Toponymy, has hardly been explored from the point of view of its resourcefulness. Although very few examples were given in our presentation, geographical names have produced quite a number of nouns or adjectives and an extremely small number of verbs.

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BASE-COINING WORD BUILDING MECHANISMS

EXERCISES 1. Use a good (etymological) dictionary and write the lexical card of the following proper-name-derived words: jersey, bikini, vulcanize, sardine, to hector, damascene, baldachin, astrakhan, Madeira, messaline, Note: a lexical card should include the following details: Word Meaning(s) Details about the origin of the word Example in a context. 2. Consider the examples below and use each of the words in the pairs in sentences of your own: Limousin limousine Bordereau - bordereau Moor moor Pole - pole Webster webster Warren warren Veronica veronica Abigail abigail Coleen coleen 3. Give two examples of chemical elements whose names originate in: a) names of planets, b) names of European countries. 4. Give five examples of plants (flowers and trees) whose names come from names of persons. Build three sentences to use some of your examples of such names of plants. 5. Make up four sentences to use names of food and drinks which originate in names of countries, counties or towns. 6. Use a good (etymological) dictionary and build sentences to illustrate the meaning of the following idiomatic constructions: To offend Mrs Grundy, to send somebody to Coventry, from Dan to Beersheba, from China to Peru, to grin like a Cheshire cat, to carry coal to Newcastle.

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