COLLIN PIPRELL Generating realities, exploring them, losing the thread.

27Sep/110

Get your new words while they’re hot (warm, anyway)

Posted by Collin Piprell

David_Foster_Wallace

Watch the English language evolve! Here are some of this site’s neologisms—original, borrowed and even commissioned—from my posts over the past year or two. The numbers refer to how many hits each gets on Google as of right now.

* Cymbalalalazophobia (fashioned to order by Dr Anthony Alcock, coiner of words for our age extraordinaire). 0 hits (a big surprise) 

* Iktsuarpok (with thanks to the Inuit and to Adam Jacot de  Boinod for collecting this specimen). 7,570 hits

 

 

* To cabbage (v. trans.) David Foster Wallace (Infinite Jest). n/a (turns out there are other “cabbage” verbs, but I can’t find references to Wallace’s usage) 

* Hobologoism/ hobologoist (coined by yours truly, I am proud to report). 10 (they all lead to my site, mind you; but just wait till next year, eh?)

* Hi-so (from current Thai slang by way of English hi*gh so*ciety). 752,000,000 (but most instances refer to other things)

* iField (with apologies to Apple). 1,470,000 (subtract references to towns named Ifield)

* Vuvuzela (from S. Africa, quickly spread around the world on a tide of footie fever, but faded as fast from the popular mind). 11,600,000 (9,320,000 for “vuvuzela 2011,” so maybe it isn't fading as fast as all that)

* Democrazy (used in newspaper interview by former Thai Finance Minister Korn Chatikavanij, at a time, last year, when local demos had indeed gone patently crazy).  755,000 (the word is everywhere, and, just like its half-cognate, applied to all manner of things)

* Apocalyptic cosmophobia (me, looking forward to 2012). 3 (all my site)

* Beepification/ beepify (Leary’s coinage). 5 (only one of them referring to Leary; the expression has had multiple geneses)

* Absent presence (an expression for our times, coined a few years ago and likely to enjoy increasing currency over the years to come). 89,100,000

So that's it for now, with help from a scholarly friend, the South Africans, Inuit, and Thais, a writer or two, and a relic Boomer channelling from 50 years ahead. Stay tuned for more news of  changes to the language, not to mention recommended changes.

The ghost portrait of David Foster Wallace brooding at the top of the page won't go away.  I fear he's holding me in some way responsible for something.

Filed under: Hobologoism, Lists, Neologisms, words No Comments
29Mar/100

My list

Posted by Collin Piprell

I’m going to add yet one more wrap-up list to the long end-of-first-decade of the New Millennium lists. (To the surprise of some, our world has survived to read these lists.) I invite visitors to offer their own notions of what the most significant developments have been—those with the greatest potential to transform our lives.

 As a starter, but not necessarily in the following order, I’d propose these:

         - advances in nanotechnology

         - digital social networking, wikis, etc.

- research in qubital computing

- start-up of the Large Hadron Collider

- growing popularization of certain ideas in the general population, e.g.:

* this planet represents, on one level, a single ecosystem for which we are all equally responsible;

* this ecosystem is in imminent crisis

* “the singularity”;

* machines will eventually evolve “true” intelligence;

* standard Darwinian principles only account for part of the evolutionary story, and that “creative emergence” (as opposed to creationist theories) presents a real phenomenon meriting scientific, social and political consideration;

* life is radically opportunistic, and quite possibly ubiquitous—both terrestrially and extraterrestrially; and

* our “universe” may in fact be, in some sense or senses, only one of many.

 

One important development stands outside this list. The vast majority of the world’s population is unaware of or uninterested in these developments, and their attitudes are being shaped by other ideas, including the notion that their fundamental values and interests are in important ways opposed to those of the materially and informationally privileged minority who do think these developments are very important. And that’s a stodgy mouthful, by God.

I could spin more, but I’d rather hear your ideas (including comments on my shortlist).

Filed under: Lists, Uncategorized No Comments
   

Man for an age

A man for an age already fading into history, I’m writing novels in an era where, before long, everyone will be a writer, yet no one will be a genuine reader.

Blow me down. I've just coined another aphorism. Do you suppose there’s any way I could eke a living from aphorisms?

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