March 16, 2020 • 52 mins
Where do new words come from? Robert and Joe explore in the latest episode of Invention.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Invention, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey,
welcome to Invention. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm
Joe McCormick, and we're back with part two of our
discussion of invented words. So in the last episode we
were talking about neologisms that were deliberately invented and continuing
(00:23):
that today, I wanted to start out with a distinction
that we might find useful, and that's the difference between
neologisms and something we might call protologisms. So a neologism
is a newly coined term that's like still in the
process of coming into common use. You might use the
term because you're an early adopter of it, but it
(00:43):
might be the kind of word that people still need
to look up a good bit. You might need to
explain what it means if you use it in an article. Right,
it could be very much be one of those words
that you get the feeling that's that people in in
the culture are trying to make happen, like they're trying
to establish it, uh and and get it into it
just the the everyday lexicon. Right, that that would be
what happens if it's successful, it just becomes a regular word.
(01:07):
You no longer need to explain it. You don't need
to look it up. Most people just know what it means. Uh.
And there are a few examples of neologisms like I
could think of that have just become regular words in
recent years. One great example, I think is selfie. You
know how this was once a cute new word, and
people would remark on the fact that it was a
cute new word, like the fact that it was a
(01:29):
neologism was one of the main things you know about it.
And now it's just sort of a word, and it's
it's weird, like selfie as a term has this kind
of like viral presence and movement in our in our culture,
but but also the act associated with it seemed to
spread with it. And I wonder to what extent are
you seeing the the act the practice of taking selfie.
(01:52):
Is that pulling the term with it through our culture
or is it the reverse or is it some combination
of the two. I think that certainly the first part
that you're talking. I think there are definitely technological pressures
that made room for this word to intercommon usage. So
the word was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in
(02:13):
but the word has a kind of interesting history Before that,
I was looking up, but what what was the earliest
use of selfie? Because obviously the act of taking a
photograph of yourself goes way back. People have been doing
that for more than a hundred years, with various contraptions,
even just like timers on cameras and stuff. Um. But
the first documented use of the word selfie appears to
(02:35):
come from the year two thousand two, when an Australian
man posted the following message on an Internet forum on
a news website. Specifically, this was a thread from September
two two by a user named Hopie h O p
e Y, and the statement goes like this, UM drunk
(02:56):
at a mates twenty one, I tripped over and landed
lip first with front teeth coming a close second on
a set of steps. I had a hole about one
centimeter long right through my bottom lip and sorry about
the focus. It was a selfie. He attaches a photo
of his busted lip for people to look at. The
(03:17):
purpose of the thread was Hopie wondering whether licking his
lips would make his stitches dissolved too early, and he's
of course apologizing for the the the quality of the
photographs saying I have taken it myself. It is a selfie, right,
so this is before selfie sticks. This is even before
you know, any kind of high quality camera phone. This
(03:37):
probably would have been taken I guess with just like
a handheld digital camera pointed back at his face. But
he probably wouldn't have the ability to see the screen
while he's taking the picture, right, so he just has
to guess yeah, yeah, so yeah. Been the early days
of selfies when they were, they're even a far more chatic.
Though it's not clear that the author of this post
actually intended to invent a word, or even that he
(03:59):
invented a word at all. It might have been a
slang word in oral circulation before ever being written out
in this context, and it does follow a standard way
of inventing slang words in Australian English, which is adding
a hyphen i e suffix to a noun, So like
a barbecue becomes a barbie, you know, put another shrimp
(04:21):
on the barbie, or a can of beer becomes a
tinny from tin can. I haven't heard that one in use,
but it makes sense and by the same lexical logic,
a photograph of the self becomes a selfie, you know,
put another duck lips on the selfie. But if this
was a term in oral slang in Australian English before
it appeared in print, I would say it probably wasn't
(04:42):
being used a lot, because if it was used a lot,
you'd expect to find it written down at this point. Now,
of course, the obvious question about this is like, why
does it then get picked up, Why does selfie become
a tern, how does it create How does this journey
even begin into widespread usage. Yeah, so after two thousand
two it pop up here and there, but it didn't
come anywhere near common usage until around two thousand twelve
(05:05):
when it's suddenly got very popular. And this probably had
to do with simultaneous techno cultural trends. You had new
generations of camera phones and of social media a way
to take selfies and then also a place to post them.
And this I think the technology made a pre existing
word suddenly very useful. And it may also, I think
(05:26):
have played an important psycho social role, like does having
a word like selfie help defuse potential doubts or worries
people have that they are engaging in narcissistic behavior does
the word take an act that you might worry is
unsavory and make it cute? Like that? There? I was
(05:47):
reading something where the editorial director of the Oxford Dictionaries
in said, specifically of the word, the use of the
diminutive I e. Suffix is notable as it helps to
turn and essentially narcissistic enterprise into something rather more endearing.
But then again, maybe that's overly harsh. You could look
at it the other way, like, does having a word
(06:08):
like selfie make it easier to disparage an activity that
most people do? You know, it's not like you have
to be some raging narcissists to take a selfie? Does
it just like make it easier to mock people like this? Well? Yeah, yeah,
I can certainly see both sides of the coin there.
And now, another thing about the about adding I e
to to something is it comes from the the the
(06:31):
parental sphere of things and uh and observing how children
will frequently add that to a word to say, name
is stuffed animal. So if it's a bear, you might
just make it it's Barry Buries the name of the bear. Um,
you know, it's it's a cute. See addition to any
word uh. And then that lines up with this idea
that it makes something that could be viewed as being
(06:54):
you know, egotistical or not narcissistic, as being something that
is ultimately cute and harmless. Well, if you say, ah ha,
I took a selfie, it almost is self deprecating in
a way that defuses the potential for someone to criticize
you as narcissistic for doing it right, because it is
it has this feeling of being silly as well as
(07:17):
you know, silly, harmless, but also maybe a little bit narcissistic.
But but but but it is acknowledging the inherent narcissism
of the act, you know, and and dismissing it with
this air of silliness to it. Like if we instead
of having picking up the words selfie, if we'd gone
with ego bonk, you know, like that would probably be
(07:37):
that's a little bit silly too. But I can see
where people would be a little less inclined to use
that terminology if they were like, well, i'm early for
my meeting. Here's a quick ego bonk. Uh. You know,
quick selfie works a lot better, and it's a little
a little catchier. Yeah, or if we'd called it like
self porn or something. Not going to take that back, Sorry,
(07:58):
you know I just said, and then try to take
it back, But you convince me we should go down
this road. I was saying, another alternative, what would you
call it? You call it something like mirror porn or
something like. That's you know, self porn, because this is
now a common suffix. Actually, absolutely, you hear people talking
about what food porn or food porn? I think was
the big one that caught hold the idea that of
(08:20):
of saying that generally photography of food and a picture
of some sort of a very delicious looking dish or
or a beverage or something, uh is therefore therefore should
be compared to pornography, which is a weird pairing because
pornography is incredibly divisive in in culture. There it is
(08:41):
it is, you know, no matter what your personal take
on it. There's a lot of problematic area to consider
when thinking about pornography. Why do we drag it then
in to our consideration of say a very inviting looking lasagna, Well, yeah,
it could be just what we're talking about with this
possibility for selfie that it's like self deprecating and ironic
(09:02):
in a way that diffuses other people's ability to criticize
you for engaging in it, because it's like you're already
sort of criticizing yourself, right, and I guess you're also
leaning into the idea that into the the excess of
pornography and and therefore diffusing this like food styling, uh
you know, high art photography, food photography interpretations that might
(09:25):
otherwise be uh applied to it. So like if you
were to say, hey, I'm trying to out some food photography,
then people would have it would be able to say, well, actually,
i've seen professional food photography, and you know that the
lighting looks weird here. Um, you know, the the phizz
isn't right. It's said right. You know, we've all I
think picked up on some of the various tips, tricks
(09:46):
and and uh and illusions that are involved in that.
But if you just say, oh, it's just food porn,
that kind of implies that that it's it's less about
the art and more about invoking a visceral bonds to
the stimuli. Yeah, I think I think you're right there.
So obviously words like this are are great examples of
(10:06):
powerful lexical success stories like a selfie, of course is
though probably a much greater number of newly coined words
just fall by the wayside, right, you know, Instead, they
become little blips in literary history that you can find
in articles from a certain time period, but they just
don't catch on. They don't become common, right Like I'm imagining, um,
(10:28):
drunk injured Australian dudes say a lot of interesting things,
but they don't all become parts of the global lexicon, right.
And I think with these examples, the things that fall
by the wayside, it might be useful to think of
them as sort of failed protologisms or protologism. Oh man,
I think I'm going back and forth on whether that
that g is hard or soft. We'll we'll just plow
(10:50):
right through um. But the idea of a protologism is
a term introduced by the Russian American UH literary theorist
Mikhail in Epstein, who I believe is still a professor
at Emory University here in Atlanta. Quick question, is the
word protologism a protologism or a neologism? I would say
at this point it is a neologism. It was originally
(11:12):
a protology well, I guess I have to define them.
So a protologism in Mikhail Epstein's definition is that it's
a word that is freshly coined and hasn't yet been
accepted by many speakers at all. And the evidence of
this would be that it has not yet been published
by anyone other than the person or group that coined it.
And I imagine they're using the term published here in
(11:34):
the broader sense, so not merely the printed word, but
any kind of media publication in the same way, in
the same way you might treat publishing in publication and
say both libel and slander law. Right, So if you
are trying to make fetch happen but nobody else is
saying fetch, then it's still a protologism for you. Maybe
if you get a few other people saying fetch, you're
(11:57):
starting to make fetch happen, then it's becoming a neologism.
And if it keeps going and then everybody starts using it,
then it's common use. Not to say it's immortal, not
to say it cannot then die, fall out of fashion,
and die again, but it has at least gained a foothold. Yeah,
So by these standards, I would say protologism was once
a protologism, but it is no longer a protologism, given
(12:20):
that you can find articles out there that are not
written by Michael Epstein himself that are using this term
and talking about it, so it has probably legitimately graduated
to being a fledgling neologism. It's, you know, still sort
of a young word, a word that not everybody knows,
but it has use outside the the original you know,
(12:41):
like the room where it was created or the person
who tried to coin it. So under this model, the
progression goes like that you've a person or a group
coins a new term or usage this is a protologism,
and then an expanded subset of the population sort of
tries out the new term for a period of time,
but it still often needs to be defined or look
to up. At this point you would say it's probably
(13:01):
a neologism. And then eventually the term just becomes a
word of common use. It doesn't need to be looked
up or defined in the context in which it is
normally used. I mean, people still have to look up
all kinds of words, but like there there at least
will be contexts in which the word is regularly used,
and and the people within those contexts all know what
it means. I'd say a good indicator here is when
(13:24):
people mostly stop googling the word for a definition. Imagine
there's a new word. Let's say it is schmirf plex,
like in the first time you hear it as someone says, Hey,
come to my house at eight and bring your smurf
smirt plex. Well, I don't know what a smirt plex is,
and that sentence gives me no context. I have no
idea what I'm supposed to bring. All I know is
that smirt plex can be brought. But smirt plex could
(13:47):
be it could be an attitude, it could be it
could it could be a physical thing. I don't know.
Or someone might say pizza cutter, Yeah, there's no way
to tell. Someone might say, Gosh, I really like Dylan,
I just wish he wasn't so smirt plexy. Again, no idea.
That's depending on how it said. You might be able
to lean into positive or negative interpretations, but beyond that
(14:10):
hard to say. Now, if someone says I can't wait
to smirt plex that slice of pizza, or do do
you smirt plex that slice of pizza? In one goal.
Both of these examples give you far more context for
not only how it is being used, but then how
it can be reused appropriately yea, or at least semi appropriately,
And then with some course correction, you can wind up
in a place where you were finally using this new
(14:32):
term correctly and passing it viraly onto those around you. Well,
this example brings up a great question, which is why
would you bother inventing a new word for something? The
side of course, to illustrate a point in a podcast, right, yes,
now it's clear why you do it there, But what
like what if you were actually trying to make smirt
plex happen? Is there a reason you would be doing this?
(14:55):
Maybe we should take a break and then when we
come back we can talk about that. Alright, we're back,
all right. We were asking the question of why protologisms
are coined. When somebody comes up with a new word
for something on purpose, Why does that happen? One pretty
(15:15):
important reason for coining into a new term, obviously, I
think it comes about often in science, and that's discovering
a new process or proposing a new theory. You're essentially
saying we have new new content in the world. Now,
and we need a word to describe it. It's not
something that you're already familiar with that we just wanted
a different word for right. So I found a short
(15:37):
article from two thousand eleven by Andrew Moore, who's the
editor in chief of a journal called bio Essays, and
in this article he talks about the importance of neologisms
and the sciences, and he writes the following. Neologisms or
protologisms quote may be considered seductive in two senses. Firstly,
(15:57):
because their creators are seduced by the ability need to
express a potentially new scientific concept in language, a creative
act that might stake their claim as the first to
discover something. Secondly, because they often find favor in the
rest of the scientific community for their conciseness. So here
more argues that in the science is protologisms play multiple roles.
(16:21):
The first, of course, is the straightforward utility, being that
they are concise. So like once Charles Barnes invented the
word photosynthesis, it was much more convenient to just say
photosynthesis than to say the process by which autotrophic organisms
like plants use energy from sunlight to convert carbon dioxide
and water into sugars, rolls off the tongue much better,
(16:44):
right You. You don't want to have to explain that
process every time you talk about it. You can just
use the one new word now. And new terms appear
in the sciences all the time because they're indisputably useful.
They save time, they save space, and now now you
all have the same word you can refer to when
you're talking about something, so you know you're talking about
the same thing. In addition to that, though that this
(17:05):
thing more is drawing attention to, is that they may
play a psychological and social role within their use in
the sciences because the neologism number one, it helps its
coiner secure credit for having identified or proposed the thing
or the hypothesis in question. And I think this is
really truly the case. I think how often on this
(17:27):
very show, historical priority for discoveries and inventions is in
fact a disputed, but we generally end up trying to
give recognition to the first person to use the same
word that everybody still uses for the thing. Right. Yeah, Well,
when when someone is calling the particular invention by a
different term, it's sort of implied that they didn't have
(17:50):
it figured out all the way, right even maybe even
if that person was more important in the in the
technological discoveries that led to the to the invention, right right, Yeah,
because ultimately, yeah, that the spread of the name is
tied with the spread of the idea. I feel like
we have repeatedly run into this in invention history, where
you know, somebody else's work was more pivotal, but ultimately
(18:12):
credit goes to the person who came up with the word.
But then, the other point is that the new word
also makes other scientists more likely to remember and discuss
your hypothesis or discovery, because it's easier to talk about
when it has a name, especially if it has a
catchy name. Uh So more rights. He gives an example quote.
(18:32):
It is said that kur at All, in their landmark
nineteen seventy two paper, coined the term apoptosis, and of
course that means um, you know, programmed cell death within
the body uh from the Greek apo meaning from and
potosis meaning falling uh to sound similar to necrosis, it's
biological counterpart. Though at the time more than a few
(18:55):
scientists doubted that the new word was anything more than
an impostor disguising a specific case of necrosis. It's certainly
helped to catapult the concept into new realms of attention
and hence testability. So this is interesting. It's like if
you're a scientist, you've got a new phenomenon you you
think you've discovered, or a hypothesis you want more people
(19:17):
to investigate. If you come up with a good word
for it, other scientists are more likely to pay attention
and start putting your idea to the test. In a
weird way. To come back to the invention parallels, it's
very much like branding and marketing. Yeah, I think evolution
is another great example of this. You know, like the
term uh so nicely sums up what is otherwise a
(19:42):
fairly complicated process that might not roll off the tongue
as easily. Oh and this was huge at the time,
with you know, Darwin agonizing over what was the best
terminology to use to explain in a simple way his
complex ideas, Like there was the competition within the theory
for you know, was it better to call it natural
(20:03):
selection or survival of the fittest. We have an episode
of stuff to blow your mind where we talk about
just like the fight back and forth between those two
terms which sort of described the same thing, but they
have different marketing appeals. Now, the other side of the
coin and all of this is is that why while
the use of words like this can certainly make it
easier to communicate about topics within the sciences, there's there
(20:27):
is evidence to indicate that it can in some cases
make it harder for those outside the field to understand
what's being discussed. Uh. And then this can often result
in a in a lack of interest in science or
politics is another example that's brought up or a feeling
that one is not good at science or politics, you
know and so so not not an idea that you
(20:48):
don't understand it and maybe you can't understand it. Um.
This according to a fairly recent study from Hilary Shulman,
Assistant Professor of Communication at the Ohio State University. UM,
you just came out in a patst couple of months. Basically,
the idea is that the the specialized terms they're looking at,
we're proving to be a stumbling block to interest. And
(21:08):
this of course just drives home the importance of science
communication and journalism in the fields of science and politics,
because obviously you need those specialized terms within science, within
the sciences, within like you know, academic discussion of politics, etcetera.
But then if you were going to convey those ideas
to the to the world outside of that in group,
(21:31):
you have to have more generalized terminology. You have to
find to have a way of reaching him, at least
until those terms become so widely used that you don't
have to worry about it, right, I mean, yeah, I
mean there are different considerations in play in these different
types of communication. I mean in scientific publications. Yeah, you
would waste a lot of space if you couldn't use
technical jargon. It just like allows you to say a
(21:54):
lot more in a lot less words, right, And a
lot of this also comes down to intended audience as well, Like, uh,
you know, the average person on the street is not
the intended reader for an academic neuroscience paper. Likewise, I
am not the the intended listener for a you know,
a very specific nineties dance hall uh reggae tune. You know. Um,
(22:17):
I have to come to it as an outsider. And
now it's possible that you know, years or decades down
the road, some of those terminal terms become part of
the general lexicon in either example. But it's not necessarily
going to be the case. Now there are examples, clearly,
I think where what you're talking about, though, where technical
language is just purely counterproductive, or at least counterproductive given
(22:41):
what somebody might state their their aims are, maybe not
to what their actual aims are. Joe, are you saying
that it's time to synergize backwards overflow? I think it's
time to talk a little bit about corporate speak. Yeah.
Uh so, of course one of my favorite sources of
everyday comedy and shame is corporate speak, this vast, shallow
cool of business neologisms that I sometimes imagine us just
(23:04):
sort of spending our days ladling over one another, like
so much stagnant pond water. We have to swim through
it from time to time. Yeah, And there was recently
a really excellent article I thought on corporate speak in
New York Magazine. It was from February of this year,
so by Molly Young called garbage language. Why do corporations
(23:24):
speak the way they do? Uh? In my opinion, this
was a very funny and insightful article on on the
phenomena of business buzzwords, which she calls garbage language, taking
the term from a novelist, and by that you might
guess where she stands on the subject. And of course
this kind of language is easy to hate, but that
doesn't make her wrong. She begins with an example of
(23:45):
a corporate word that she encountered at a startup where
she recently worked. Quote. The term was parallel path. And
I first heard it in this sentence, we're waiting on
specs from the San Francisco installation. Can you pari well
path two versions? Translated, this means we're waiting on specs
(24:05):
from the San Francisco installation? Can you make two versions?
So she summarizes, in other words, to parallel path is
to do two things at once. That's all. But it
gives it this kind of It almost has like a
Buddhist air to it. Right, there's a middle path, parallel paths.
It sounds far more peaceful than can you do twice
(24:26):
as much work as we originally talked about. I'm sure
you know you've probably heard me complain about this on
one of our shows before. This kind of thing is
so annoying to me, and I want to be clear,
I understand the creation of new technical terms in business
when they function the way that words normally do, right
by putting a concise name to something that would otherwise
(24:46):
require more explanation. And I think there are plenty of
perfectly legitimate business terms that are actually useful, and they
could be compared to specific technical jargon, and like medicine
or the science is one example. Here might be the
original use of disruption or disruptive. Like originally this referred
to a specific thing. It wasn't a new word, but
(25:06):
it was a word that gained a new usage in
a business context. And uh, this was coined by a
guy named Clayton Christensen in the nineties, and it referred
to like an innovation that creates a new market and
a new type of value, displacing old markets and old values.
So an example might be the mass production of automobiles
(25:27):
with the Model T, which isn't just a new competitor
and entering a market, but it completely kind of disrupts
the transportation market. It, you know, upsets the old like
traditional horse and buggy market. Uh. But even with this word,
which originally I think has a specific meaning and is useful,
I think there's a kind of semantic creep, right, whereover
time its meaning becomes less specific and people start using
(25:50):
the word disruption or disruptive to just refer to any
business innovation or maneuver that they want to be seen
as new and dynamic. It's like it's like using the
word like powerful or strong. You see people describing business
things as disruptive that are in no way really changing markets,
are creating new markets. They're just like they're just saying, like,
(26:13):
you know, we're gonna be big, We're gonna spend a
lot of money on this and enter the market. So
some words really have a meaning, But at the same time,
a lot of corporate speak just feels like replacing one
number of normal, understandable words with an equal number or
more of confusing, buzzy technical words. There's no efficiency advantage
(26:33):
in the communication. The communication becomes understandable by a smaller
number of people. Why does this happen well? With regard
to the idea of a parallel path, Young continues quote,
I thought there was something gorgeously and inadvertently candid about
the phrases assumption that a person would ever not be
doing more than one thing at a time in an office.
(26:55):
It's denial that the whole point of having an office
job is to multitask in effectively instead of single tasking effectively.
Why invent a term for what people were already forced
to do? It was, and it's fakery and puffery and
lack of a reason to exist. The perfect corporate neologism
now hold on. One can multitask and effectively at home
(27:17):
as well as in the office. That's quite true. I
think we can all attest to that. But but no,
I get their point here. As she discusses a bunch
more examples, I think I'd say the article is very
worth reading. And of course she's fairly merciless and hypothesizing
the reasons these terms are often used. For example, she
says that you know, some corporate speak simply reflects a
(27:37):
desire to reimagine exactly what type of work it is
you're doing and what that work means. She says, quote,
our attraction to certain words surely reflects an inner yearning.
Computer metaphors appeal to us because they imply futurism and
hyper efficiency, while the language of self empowerment hides a
deeper anxiety about our relationship to work, a sense that
(28:00):
what we're doing may actually be trivial, that the reward
of free snacks for cultural fealty is not an exchange
that benefits us, that none of this was worth going
into student debt for, and that we could be fired
instantly for complaining on Slack about it. And she ends
this uh string of thoughts by saying, empowerment language is
a self marketing asset as much as anything else, a
(28:23):
way of selling our jobs back to ourselves. I think
there's a lot of truth to that. Yeah, yeah, And
a lot of times it does seem very you know,
intentionally euphemistic, you know, to try to having to explain
describe something in terms that are less damaging or more positive.
(28:44):
Like one example that comes to mind is is something
that's used a lot in business speaking, that's pivoting, you know,
pivoting to video, for example, which sounds a lot better
than you know, drastically or recklessly changing course or being
thrown in the throne off course by you know, the
slightest change and the winds of of of public demand
(29:06):
and business. That sort of thing, Uh, pivot sounds like
very geometric, you know, it sounds very precise and premeditated.
It's what your office chair does when you turn to
look at your other monitor, an obvious one about obvious.
One of these euphemisms is just trying to cover up
hard truths. Is like when I don't know all of
(29:26):
the buzzy corporate words for basically firing people. Oh yeah, like,
are you gonna fire people? Are you going to terminate people?
Are you going to engage in a strategic head count reduction?
Or a new one? This was one that only came
out recently to my knowledge, employment dislocation, which when I
first read it, I had no idea what it meant.
I was like, oh, I guess they moved their jobs
(29:48):
to another city, like there's there's a geographic change, and
maybe it wasn't that bad. And I think, now what
we're talking about is just people being terminated. I mean,
but but then again, you know, look at it from
a business's standpoint and like, no, what business is going
to you know, send out a corporate email and begin
by saying, who, we just really had a blood bath. Everybody.
(30:11):
If you're reading this, you're all right, but you know, no, no,
nobody's gonna engage in that kind of uh, you know,
intercommunication about what has happened or out of communication you're
you're you're gonna want to put a positive spin on
it and leave the negative interpretations to other folks to do.
What do you know? One of the worst things about
(30:32):
this type of language is as much as I hate it,
I sometimes find myself unconsciously using it in work emails
and stuff I don't mean to, but it infects you.
Here's the Well, here's one that we've I've seen used
to hear at work from time to time. What happens
when a new podcast or even an older podcast UH
is not living up to expectations? Well, do you just
(30:56):
cancel it? Do you terminate it? Or do you son
set it? That's one of those great examples. Yeah. Well,
one of the things that Young talks about a lot
in the article is the recent explosion of new ag
language in UH in business, you know, corporate speak, Like
there are these phases where corporate speak in the eighties
(31:16):
was infected with all these Wall Street style terms, and
in the nineties there was a lot of there was
a lot of like war and battle type language in
corporate speak. And for some reason, now we're in an
age of new age kind of mystical corporate speak. Are
they saying things like, alright, it's time to really open
up the chakras on this new ad campaign. I think
(31:38):
there are some things like that. I think a lot
of it probably comes from the tech world actually, where
they're you know, there are a ton of people in
the tech world who are also plugged into like Eastern
religion and stuff, so so I guess you could say
a lot of it is is tied to in these
cases to putting a new spin on something that is familiar. Uh,
Like taking something that may seem even exotic and using
(31:59):
that is a way to recast something that is for
far more ordinary. Yeah, I think there there are several
reasons we can come away with here why we often
see the introduction of neologisms in the corporate world. One
is to sort of reimagine or put a new psychological
spin on what it is you're doing that you know,
makes it feel maybe more spiritual, or makes it feel
(32:20):
more combative or something whatever it is that gets you
amped up. Another is to be euphemistic, to like to
take hard truths and make them sound like something different
than they are. And then I would say there is
another one, which is just a desire to sound professional,
like there's this idea that okay, where are people definitely
(32:41):
doing real work. One place you know that they're doing
that is like in the sciences and in engineering and stuff,
and they have lots of technical jargon, you know. But
in the sciences and engineering you probably need a lot
of technical jargon that is not actually there's nothing equivalent
to it that's necessary in a normal office. But you
(33:02):
have this desire to feel like you are accomplishing things
at the same level as the sciences are in engineering.
And then of course to come back to politics, and
politics is very much an example of of of of
a situation where you're needing to continually spin things, uh,
either in one direction or the other and uh, and
in doing so you come up with different different terminologies
(33:25):
to different descriptions of of what of things that are
essentially the same. Yes, I think that fits more in
with the the one about you know, wanting to reimagine
your job or sell your job back to yourself with
you know, new uh corporate neologisms because they help you
feel a certain way. You know, in politics, obviously you're
trying to make other people feel a certain way about
(33:47):
a concept by using pushy terminology about it all right,
we're gonna take one more break, but when we come back,
you know, we're gonna get into a little bit of
science fiction e territory here as we look at a
couple of examples of of new words that came up
on us and and some of their their their fictional origins,
but also some of the fictional engines that help them
(34:11):
reach their place in our lexicon. Alright, we're back, So
we're going to talk about a couple more interesting examples
of invented words and what they tell us about the
you know, the the process by which words are coined.
The next one I think is interesting because it's common
(34:31):
usage is so uh intention with the spirit of its coinage.
And that word is robot, right and boy, And this
is one that is um. Robot is so broadly used
these days to things that are perhaps not technically robots
get called robots um, and the things that sometimes things
(34:52):
that are for all intents and purposes robots don't get
called robot. It's uh, it's it's a weird one. So
will be a wonderful journey. So you could be forgiven
for assuming that the word robot was coined by an inventor, right,
somebody who maybe somebody who made automata or somebody who
created an early autonomous machine. But no, not at all.
(35:14):
This invented word, like so many others we have discussed,
actually comes from a work of fiction. That work was
a play called are You Are, which stood for Rossom's
Universal Robots. And this was a play written by the
check writer and intellectual Karl Choppeck. It premiered in nineteen one,
and it's basic plot was that an inventor named Rossum
(35:37):
creates a series of artificial humans to serve as slaves
for regular humans. But these slaves ultimately revolt against their
human creators and they basically kill all the humans and
they take over, and then they find out, oh no,
we don't know how to make more of ourselves. But
these slaves in the play are known as robots. And
(35:58):
this word is not invented out of whole cloth. It's
adapted from a check word. I think that comes from
an old Slavonic term. Uh. The word is robot to
r O b O t a, which means forced labor
or servitude. It is the kind of labor that would
have been done by surfs under feudalism. Now, of course,
(36:18):
this idea of a robot is somewhat different from what
it usually means today. Today, a robot is generally some
kind of machine that operates with some degree of independence
and moves with some degree of freedom, mimicking human or
animal movement. You can tell from what I just said,
of course, that the concept is actually a little bit hazy,
(36:39):
even though it is so widely used. But the robots
in Shopics Play, while they are manufactured products, are not
depicted as being mechanical machines made out of metal. They're closer,
I think, to the replicants of Blade Runner. They are
sort of like basically humans in every respect, except they
are manufactured instead born, And the comparison to Blade Runner
(37:02):
is very close when you look at some of the
texts in the play. For example, there's this part where
there's a triumphal speech given by a robot named Radius
after he and the other robot rebels sees power from
the humans. Roddy As says, quote, the power of man
has fallen. By gaining possession of the factory, we have
become masters of everything. The period of mankind has passed away.
(37:26):
A new world has arisen. Mankind is no more mankind
gave us two little life. We wanted more life. Oh man,
that's Roy Batty, right, yeah, you can just you can
envision him giving that speech. And so it makes me
think that Are you Are must have directly inspired Blade Runner. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
certainly really Scott's adaptation of the original Philip K. Dick,
(37:50):
Uh do Android's stream of Electric Sheep. But I don't
think that line is in the Philip K. Dick. I don't.
It's when a long time, so they're reddit, but I don't.
I don't remember that as being parted. Like I remember
picking up that is. I think that was the first
phil K Dick book I read, and my experience was
probably like a lot of people would pick it up
expecting Blade Runner at the film and it's you get
(38:10):
something different. Is there are a lot of differences between
the novel and the book is great, but oh it's wonderful.
It's very different. It's very different. The book is wonderful
for the kind of state of unreality that it conjures
because of like the moments where the main character starts
to wonder if he is real or not. It's very
Philip K. Dick I was. I would remember being so
(38:30):
excited to read Blade Runner that I even read another
another novel that was called Blade Runner. There was like
a futuristic sci fi world about. It had to do
with like a medical um, a medical black market, like
generally somebody who's running like surgical blades. Did this come
out after the movie? This was like, I'm not sure
(38:50):
when it came out. I just remember finding a what
felt like an old book in my school library and
I was like, all right, it's close enough, I'll read
the whole thing. So I remember being entertaining, but it
also not Late Runner. Well, anyway, I was reading a
good article about this in the m I. T Press
by a Penn State professor named John im Jordan's uh.
(39:11):
And Jordan lays out some interesting context for are you
are uh? He writes of Choppe quote. Like many of
his peers, he was appalled by the carnage wrought by
the mechanical and chemical weapons that marked World War One
as a departure from previous combat. He was also deeply
skeptical of the utopian notions of science and technology. And
(39:31):
you should remember that this was a time of great
technological utopianism. You know, remember our episodes on the invention
of the supposed death ray in this period, which despite
the name, was actually pitched as something beautiful and humane.
It was a technology that would end all possibility of war,
It would bring about an era of peace and harmony.
(39:52):
And the death ray was by far, you know, not
the only example. This was the time of you know,
Tesla and Marconi in so many others fielding the idea
that coming technologies would eliminate war and disease and want.
But of course there were many others like Chopek who
reacted to the technological horrors of World War One with
skepticism about the promises of of new science and technology.
(40:15):
Uh and so, yeah, he's criticizing this idea of of
science that is that is not concerned with big questions,
or with ethics, or or even the the ultimate purpose
of its own endeavor, That is just concerned with like
what sort of leverage it can have over the physical world,
what can you produce? But Jordan's characterizes chop x opinion
(40:35):
on mechanization by saying, quote, when mechanization overtakes basic human traits,
people lose the ability to reproduce, as robots increase in capability, vitality,
and self awareness, humans become more like their machines. Humans
and robots, in chop x critique are essentially one and
the same. The measure of worth industrial productivity is one
(40:57):
by the robots that can do the work of two
and half men. Such a contest implicitly critiques the efficiency
movement that emerged just before World War One, which ignored
many essential human traits. Of course, this makes me think
about Dune, right, the implications of the past but lerry
a jihad, that's right, hey, when which humans rise up
(41:18):
against the rule of machines. But it's implied, it's certainly
in the original books that it's not just a it's
not simply a matter of rising up against machine overlords
in the physical totalitarian sense, but in a philosophical sense,
the idea that the machine way of life, the machine
way of thinking, has corrupted what it is to be
(41:39):
human exactly. Yes, it's not just that they're like, you know,
enemies that are trying to rule us. They've changed our
nature and we don't want that. Yeah. But anyway, given
the views of the play, there's just some intense irony
that this is actually the terminology that was adopted by
people who would end up wanting to make autonomous machines
for a living, like you know. And of course I
(42:00):
don't think there's anything wrong with wanting to go into robotics.
I think robots canna have a lot of wonderful uses. Yes, certainly.
But the term you're using is saying like I want
to go into robotics, is like literally like I want
to go into creating slaves that will destroy our spirit
and render us useless. Yeah, that's fascinating. One last thing
about the word robot. It's pronunciation also appears to have
(42:22):
changed over time. At various times it might have been
pronounced more like a robot robot? Is it ever bot?
Was it ever pronounced robot like Zoidberg does its futurama?
I think maybe at some point it was there. There
have been multiple different ways of saying now speaking of
technological fear and apprehension. Um, the next word we're going
to consider here is is a perfect extension of this
(42:44):
and ties into some of these same themes, and that
is of course clone. So clone was apparently first recorded,
uh to have been used somewhere between nineteen and nineteen
o five, and it's from the Greek word clone, a
slip a twig with clear botanical roots. Here. Plant physiologist
(43:07):
Herbert J. Webber coined the term in reference to the
technique for propagating new plants UH through the use of cuttings, bulbs,
and buds. And I was reading about this, UH in
an interview that Science Friday in their Science Diction series
UH conducted with Harold Marco, professor of History of Medicine
(43:27):
at the University of Michigan, and Ann Arbor UH. And
one thing that Marco pointed out is that Webber was
kind of trying to decide what term to use, Like
you didn't just fire from the hip here and think,
all right, what is the what? What? What words should
I use? Maybe with some of those considerations we talked
about earlier exactly. Yeah. So one of the other, like
major contender that he came up with is actually pretty great. Uh.
(43:51):
It is the word strength, a combination of strain and wraith. Wow.
But he, you know, decided it was too clumsy. But
that being said, I want there's got to be a
sci fi treatment out there, UM, somewhere where someone has
decided to abandon the word clone and just talk about streiths. UH.
Like that that just changes the whole situation. Imagine, if
(44:13):
you will, if throughout the Star Wars universe, instead of
saying clone, they said straight yeah, like that would have
had it would have made it feel it would have
been rooted in the actual origin of our usage of clone,
but it would have given it this slightly different feel
and indeed strength with its Wraith connotation. It feels a
little weird or like it's more in line with well,
(44:36):
it's good to come back to Herbert. The use of
the golas in Dune, you know where you know, it
doesn't it doesn't call them clones, It call you know,
calls them goulas, creates this new word that drags in
other um, other you know, feelings, other words, other connotations.
So um and anyway, Marco, you know, as this concept
(44:57):
steadily took off, you saw it u a lot in
the agricultural world world because that's of course where it
was originally utilized. But then it bleeds over into science fiction. However,
there are cases where you could have seen someone use
clone a lot more of where they did. In for instance,
Huxley in Brave New World doesn't refer to it as cloning,
(45:18):
refers to instead as the Bakonovsky process. But uh, but
Market points to two specific uses of clone in the
nineteen seventies that really helped to push it into the
popular lexicon, the first of which is Alvin and Heidi
Toffler's best seller Future Shock from the year nineteen seventy.
(45:39):
I know you like this and the Weird Orson Welles documentary. Yeah,
the weird the weird Horson Weil documentary, which I recommend
looking up on YouTube, is great and a little bit cheesy.
The work of the Tofflers throughout their career, they wrote
various texts of futurism, texts where they're talking about, you know,
trends and how we how we um anticipate and receive
(46:00):
new technologies, and generally the idea of future shock is
the idea that the world is changing so rapidly, there's
all these new technologies coming online that it overwhelms us
and we feel the sense of future shock. Uh And
and even today it's a you know, it's it's a
work that is to a certain extent dated by their
later works. You know that they spent their their lives,
(46:20):
they spent their careers covering this, uh, this area of
consideration but it's still a very readable text, and I
recommend it that this is a This is a line
from Future This is a paragraph from Future Shock, where
the Tofflers discuss this quote. One of the more fascinating
possibilities is that man will be able to make biological
carbon copies of himself through a process known as cloning.
(46:41):
It will be possible to grow from the nucleus of
an adult sell a new organism that has the same
genetic characteristics of the person contributing the cell nucleus. The
resultant human copy would start life with a genetic endowment
identical to that of the donor, although cultural differences might
thereafter alter personality or physical development of the clone. And
(47:04):
uh Interestingly enough, in that Science Friday interview, Howard Marcle
pointed to another work from the seventies, this time of
fictional work venties six novel by Ira Levin, The Boys
from Brazil. Oh, the one about don't they want to
clone Another Hitler? Yeah, it's a It concerns a a
fictional plot where you have uh not Nazi ex pats
(47:26):
living in South America who are hatching a scheme to
clone at off Hitler. Uh, you know, using cloning technology
to create all of these uh the these these male children,
and then trying to figure out how to raise them
so that you can nurture their genetic legacy into you know,
I guess the ideal form of the fere um, which
(47:46):
I know. There are a lot of problems with this plot,
a lot of holes in this plot, but it was
a very popular work and they made a pretty uh
I remember being a pretty entertaining film version of this
as well, and which Greg Repact plays uh uh Dr
Joseph Mangela, but also Laurence Olivier is the good guy,
right hunter um yeah, And so I I have very
(48:10):
vague memories of this film. I think I saw it
on American movie Classics back in the day, but I
remember it. I remember it being disturbing and effective in places.
I never read the book myself, but I was leafing.
I picked up grabbed a copy of it and leaf
through it before we were we recorded this with this episode,
and I did run across the passage where one character
is telling another about the origin of the word clone
(48:32):
and referring to the uh you know, the Greek and
the uh and the the the botanical origins of the term.
Uh So, anyway, I guess the idea here is that,
you know, you have two popular works that are using
the word clone, and they helped to sort of boost
the signal throughout uh, you know, the fictional world and
just the the the popular conceptions of the science itself.
(48:55):
One of the funny things though, in this selection you
pulled out is that one character says that the old
word for cloning was mono nuclear reproduction, and then complains,
why would you coin a new word like clone when
the old ones convey more? The other character says, cloning
is shorter. Oh, yes, how true coloss Uh yeah, and uh.
I was going to actually read this this uh this
(49:17):
bit from the Boys from Brazil, but I thought it
might be a little confusing because the the character that
is explaining it mentions a different biologists and mentions in
English biologists by the name of Haldane, which I thought
might confuse people who were listening to the origin story
that we've presented thus far. Okay, well, I hope I
(49:38):
didn't confuse anybody. But I like how they reproduced the
same conversation. It's interesting and it is again worth I think,
stressing the importance of science fiction especially with scientific terminology,
because there are plenty of other examples where a bit
uh like an idea is presented first in science fiction
and then gets picked up as a possibility within the sciences. Yeah,
(50:02):
you might think that somebody created a robot and then
came up with the name robot, but no, yeah goodness.
And this is without even getting into the situation where
you have fictional worlds that in which the creator comes
up with their own lexicon for like a an alternate
reality or futuristic reality like one of them. Think the
more jarring examples of this would be a clockwork orange
(50:26):
or inn In Banks wrote a book called Fearsome Engine
that is totally a totally um worthwhile read. But it
has like I think, three different perspectives in it, and
one of them is a is is is written in
this futuristic slang, and it's really really takes a little
bit of getting used to before you're rolling with it
(50:47):
and understanding what the character is saying. Um now, I
don't know. I mean, it's arguable to what extent those
kind of exercises ever actually produced new words, but there's
certainly the potentiality is there, um, you know, any time
any time a new word is presented, you're you're putting
out the possibility that it could, uh, it could become
(51:08):
a part of language itself. Yeah, I guess, so, I
guess you can't know what uh, you can't know when
you're making a word happen? Right? Can you introduce something
and it's like, I don't know, it's it's in their
hands now? Yeah? All right, Well, you know, hopefully this
we received a lot of great feedback from our previous
episode on invented words, so hopefully we'll hear a lot
of great feedback on this episode as well. We would
(51:31):
obviously love to hear everyone's thoughts on on new words
that they've picked up, new words that you've rejected, or
are there words from science fiction specifically that you find
yourself using within a particular in group or a fandom.
Are there are there some that you wish would be
picked up by the by the wider world at large?
What are the worst business neologisms you've to deal with
(51:54):
on a regular basis? Please share those with us for sure?
Or the best you know? Again, I don't want to
deny sometimes they might be useful. Sometimes they're very useful,
all right, you say with utter despair. No all right.
In the meantime, if you want to check out other
episodes of Invention, you will find this show anywhere you
get your podcasts, wherever that happens to be. Just make
(52:17):
sure you rate, review and subscribe. If you go to
invention pod dot com, that will also shoot you over
to the I heart listing for this show. Huge thanks
as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hi,
you can email us at contact at invention pod dot com.
(52:41):
Invention is production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts
from my heart Radio because the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Invention, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey,
welcome to Invention. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm
Joe McCormick, and we're back with part two of our
discussion of invented words. So in the last episode we
were talking about neologisms that were deliberately invented and continuing
(00:23):
that today, I wanted to start out with a distinction
that we might find useful, and that's the difference between
neologisms and something we might call protologisms. So a neologism
is a newly coined term that's like still in the
process of coming into common use. You might use the
term because you're an early adopter of it, but it
(00:43):
might be the kind of word that people still need
to look up a good bit. You might need to
explain what it means if you use it in an article. Right,
it could be very much be one of those words
that you get the feeling that's that people in in
the culture are trying to make happen, like they're trying
to establish it, uh and and get it into it
just the the everyday lexicon. Right, that that would be
what happens if it's successful, it just becomes a regular word.
(01:07):
You no longer need to explain it. You don't need
to look it up. Most people just know what it means. Uh.
And there are a few examples of neologisms like I
could think of that have just become regular words in
recent years. One great example, I think is selfie. You
know how this was once a cute new word, and
people would remark on the fact that it was a
cute new word, like the fact that it was a
(01:29):
neologism was one of the main things you know about it.
And now it's just sort of a word, and it's
it's weird, like selfie as a term has this kind
of like viral presence and movement in our in our culture,
but but also the act associated with it seemed to
spread with it. And I wonder to what extent are
you seeing the the act the practice of taking selfie.
(01:52):
Is that pulling the term with it through our culture
or is it the reverse or is it some combination
of the two. I think that certainly the first part
that you're talking. I think there are definitely technological pressures
that made room for this word to intercommon usage. So
the word was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in
(02:13):
but the word has a kind of interesting history Before that,
I was looking up, but what what was the earliest
use of selfie? Because obviously the act of taking a
photograph of yourself goes way back. People have been doing
that for more than a hundred years, with various contraptions,
even just like timers on cameras and stuff. Um. But
the first documented use of the word selfie appears to
(02:35):
come from the year two thousand two, when an Australian
man posted the following message on an Internet forum on
a news website. Specifically, this was a thread from September
two two by a user named Hopie h O p
e Y, and the statement goes like this, UM drunk
(02:56):
at a mates twenty one, I tripped over and landed
lip first with front teeth coming a close second on
a set of steps. I had a hole about one
centimeter long right through my bottom lip and sorry about
the focus. It was a selfie. He attaches a photo
of his busted lip for people to look at. The
(03:17):
purpose of the thread was Hopie wondering whether licking his
lips would make his stitches dissolved too early, and he's
of course apologizing for the the the quality of the
photographs saying I have taken it myself. It is a selfie, right,
so this is before selfie sticks. This is even before
you know, any kind of high quality camera phone. This
(03:37):
probably would have been taken I guess with just like
a handheld digital camera pointed back at his face. But
he probably wouldn't have the ability to see the screen
while he's taking the picture, right, so he just has
to guess yeah, yeah, so yeah. Been the early days
of selfies when they were, they're even a far more chatic.
Though it's not clear that the author of this post
actually intended to invent a word, or even that he
(03:59):
invented a word at all. It might have been a
slang word in oral circulation before ever being written out
in this context, and it does follow a standard way
of inventing slang words in Australian English, which is adding
a hyphen i e suffix to a noun, So like
a barbecue becomes a barbie, you know, put another shrimp
(04:21):
on the barbie, or a can of beer becomes a
tinny from tin can. I haven't heard that one in use,
but it makes sense and by the same lexical logic,
a photograph of the self becomes a selfie, you know,
put another duck lips on the selfie. But if this
was a term in oral slang in Australian English before
it appeared in print, I would say it probably wasn't
(04:42):
being used a lot, because if it was used a lot,
you'd expect to find it written down at this point. Now,
of course, the obvious question about this is like, why
does it then get picked up, Why does selfie become
a tern, how does it create How does this journey
even begin into widespread usage. Yeah, so after two thousand
two it pop up here and there, but it didn't
come anywhere near common usage until around two thousand twelve
(05:05):
when it's suddenly got very popular. And this probably had
to do with simultaneous techno cultural trends. You had new
generations of camera phones and of social media a way
to take selfies and then also a place to post them.
And this I think the technology made a pre existing
word suddenly very useful. And it may also, I think
(05:26):
have played an important psycho social role, like does having
a word like selfie help defuse potential doubts or worries
people have that they are engaging in narcissistic behavior does
the word take an act that you might worry is
unsavory and make it cute? Like that? There? I was
(05:47):
reading something where the editorial director of the Oxford Dictionaries
in said, specifically of the word, the use of the
diminutive I e. Suffix is notable as it helps to
turn and essentially narcissistic enterprise into something rather more endearing.
But then again, maybe that's overly harsh. You could look
at it the other way, like, does having a word
(06:08):
like selfie make it easier to disparage an activity that
most people do? You know, it's not like you have
to be some raging narcissists to take a selfie? Does
it just like make it easier to mock people like this? Well? Yeah, yeah,
I can certainly see both sides of the coin there.
And now, another thing about the about adding I e
to to something is it comes from the the the
(06:31):
parental sphere of things and uh and observing how children
will frequently add that to a word to say, name
is stuffed animal. So if it's a bear, you might
just make it it's Barry Buries the name of the bear. Um,
you know, it's it's a cute. See addition to any
word uh. And then that lines up with this idea
that it makes something that could be viewed as being
(06:54):
you know, egotistical or not narcissistic, as being something that
is ultimately cute and harmless. Well, if you say, ah ha,
I took a selfie, it almost is self deprecating in
a way that defuses the potential for someone to criticize
you as narcissistic for doing it right, because it is
it has this feeling of being silly as well as
(07:17):
you know, silly, harmless, but also maybe a little bit narcissistic.
But but but but it is acknowledging the inherent narcissism
of the act, you know, and and dismissing it with
this air of silliness to it. Like if we instead
of having picking up the words selfie, if we'd gone
with ego bonk, you know, like that would probably be
(07:37):
that's a little bit silly too. But I can see
where people would be a little less inclined to use
that terminology if they were like, well, i'm early for
my meeting. Here's a quick ego bonk. Uh. You know,
quick selfie works a lot better, and it's a little
a little catchier. Yeah, or if we'd called it like
self porn or something. Not going to take that back, Sorry,
(07:58):
you know I just said, and then try to take
it back, But you convince me we should go down
this road. I was saying, another alternative, what would you
call it? You call it something like mirror porn or
something like. That's you know, self porn, because this is
now a common suffix. Actually, absolutely, you hear people talking
about what food porn or food porn? I think was
the big one that caught hold the idea that of
(08:20):
of saying that generally photography of food and a picture
of some sort of a very delicious looking dish or
or a beverage or something, uh is therefore therefore should
be compared to pornography, which is a weird pairing because
pornography is incredibly divisive in in culture. There it is
(08:41):
it is, you know, no matter what your personal take
on it. There's a lot of problematic area to consider
when thinking about pornography. Why do we drag it then
in to our consideration of say a very inviting looking lasagna, Well, yeah,
it could be just what we're talking about with this
possibility for selfie that it's like self deprecating and ironic
(09:02):
in a way that diffuses other people's ability to criticize
you for engaging in it, because it's like you're already
sort of criticizing yourself, right, and I guess you're also
leaning into the idea that into the the excess of
pornography and and therefore diffusing this like food styling, uh
you know, high art photography, food photography interpretations that might
(09:25):
otherwise be uh applied to it. So like if you
were to say, hey, I'm trying to out some food photography,
then people would have it would be able to say, well, actually,
i've seen professional food photography, and you know that the
lighting looks weird here. Um, you know, the the phizz
isn't right. It's said right. You know, we've all I
think picked up on some of the various tips, tricks
(09:46):
and and uh and illusions that are involved in that.
But if you just say, oh, it's just food porn,
that kind of implies that that it's it's less about
the art and more about invoking a visceral bonds to
the stimuli. Yeah, I think I think you're right there.
So obviously words like this are are great examples of
(10:06):
powerful lexical success stories like a selfie, of course is
though probably a much greater number of newly coined words
just fall by the wayside, right, you know, Instead, they
become little blips in literary history that you can find
in articles from a certain time period, but they just
don't catch on. They don't become common, right Like I'm imagining, um,
(10:28):
drunk injured Australian dudes say a lot of interesting things,
but they don't all become parts of the global lexicon, right.
And I think with these examples, the things that fall
by the wayside, it might be useful to think of
them as sort of failed protologisms or protologism. Oh man,
I think I'm going back and forth on whether that
that g is hard or soft. We'll we'll just plow
(10:50):
right through um. But the idea of a protologism is
a term introduced by the Russian American UH literary theorist
Mikhail in Epstein, who I believe is still a professor
at Emory University here in Atlanta. Quick question, is the
word protologism a protologism or a neologism? I would say
at this point it is a neologism. It was originally
(11:12):
a protology well, I guess I have to define them.
So a protologism in Mikhail Epstein's definition is that it's
a word that is freshly coined and hasn't yet been
accepted by many speakers at all. And the evidence of
this would be that it has not yet been published
by anyone other than the person or group that coined it.
And I imagine they're using the term published here in
(11:34):
the broader sense, so not merely the printed word, but
any kind of media publication in the same way, in
the same way you might treat publishing in publication and
say both libel and slander law. Right, So if you
are trying to make fetch happen but nobody else is
saying fetch, then it's still a protologism for you. Maybe
if you get a few other people saying fetch, you're
(11:57):
starting to make fetch happen, then it's becoming a neologism.
And if it keeps going and then everybody starts using it,
then it's common use. Not to say it's immortal, not
to say it cannot then die, fall out of fashion,
and die again, but it has at least gained a foothold. Yeah,
So by these standards, I would say protologism was once
a protologism, but it is no longer a protologism, given
(12:20):
that you can find articles out there that are not
written by Michael Epstein himself that are using this term
and talking about it, so it has probably legitimately graduated
to being a fledgling neologism. It's, you know, still sort
of a young word, a word that not everybody knows,
but it has use outside the the original you know,
(12:41):
like the room where it was created or the person
who tried to coin it. So under this model, the
progression goes like that you've a person or a group
coins a new term or usage this is a protologism,
and then an expanded subset of the population sort of
tries out the new term for a period of time,
but it still often needs to be defined or look
to up. At this point you would say it's probably
(13:01):
a neologism. And then eventually the term just becomes a
word of common use. It doesn't need to be looked
up or defined in the context in which it is
normally used. I mean, people still have to look up
all kinds of words, but like there there at least
will be contexts in which the word is regularly used,
and and the people within those contexts all know what
it means. I'd say a good indicator here is when
(13:24):
people mostly stop googling the word for a definition. Imagine
there's a new word. Let's say it is schmirf plex,
like in the first time you hear it as someone says, Hey,
come to my house at eight and bring your smurf
smirt plex. Well, I don't know what a smirt plex is,
and that sentence gives me no context. I have no
idea what I'm supposed to bring. All I know is
that smirt plex can be brought. But smirt plex could
(13:47):
be it could be an attitude, it could be it
could it could be a physical thing. I don't know.
Or someone might say pizza cutter, Yeah, there's no way
to tell. Someone might say, Gosh, I really like Dylan,
I just wish he wasn't so smirt plexy. Again, no idea.
That's depending on how it said. You might be able
to lean into positive or negative interpretations, but beyond that
(14:10):
hard to say. Now, if someone says I can't wait
to smirt plex that slice of pizza, or do do
you smirt plex that slice of pizza? In one goal.
Both of these examples give you far more context for
not only how it is being used, but then how
it can be reused appropriately yea, or at least semi appropriately,
And then with some course correction, you can wind up
in a place where you were finally using this new
(14:32):
term correctly and passing it viraly onto those around you. Well,
this example brings up a great question, which is why
would you bother inventing a new word for something? The
side of course, to illustrate a point in a podcast, right, yes,
now it's clear why you do it there, But what
like what if you were actually trying to make smirt
plex happen? Is there a reason you would be doing this?
(14:55):
Maybe we should take a break and then when we
come back we can talk about that. Alright, we're back,
all right. We were asking the question of why protologisms
are coined. When somebody comes up with a new word
for something on purpose, Why does that happen? One pretty
(15:15):
important reason for coining into a new term, obviously, I
think it comes about often in science, and that's discovering
a new process or proposing a new theory. You're essentially
saying we have new new content in the world. Now,
and we need a word to describe it. It's not
something that you're already familiar with that we just wanted
a different word for right. So I found a short
(15:37):
article from two thousand eleven by Andrew Moore, who's the
editor in chief of a journal called bio Essays, and
in this article he talks about the importance of neologisms
and the sciences, and he writes the following. Neologisms or
protologisms quote may be considered seductive in two senses. Firstly,
(15:57):
because their creators are seduced by the ability need to
express a potentially new scientific concept in language, a creative
act that might stake their claim as the first to
discover something. Secondly, because they often find favor in the
rest of the scientific community for their conciseness. So here
more argues that in the science is protologisms play multiple roles.
(16:21):
The first, of course, is the straightforward utility, being that
they are concise. So like once Charles Barnes invented the
word photosynthesis, it was much more convenient to just say
photosynthesis than to say the process by which autotrophic organisms
like plants use energy from sunlight to convert carbon dioxide
and water into sugars, rolls off the tongue much better,
(16:44):
right You. You don't want to have to explain that
process every time you talk about it. You can just
use the one new word now. And new terms appear
in the sciences all the time because they're indisputably useful.
They save time, they save space, and now now you
all have the same word you can refer to when
you're talking about something, so you know you're talking about
the same thing. In addition to that, though that this
(17:05):
thing more is drawing attention to, is that they may
play a psychological and social role within their use in
the sciences because the neologism number one, it helps its
coiner secure credit for having identified or proposed the thing
or the hypothesis in question. And I think this is
really truly the case. I think how often on this
(17:27):
very show, historical priority for discoveries and inventions is in
fact a disputed, but we generally end up trying to
give recognition to the first person to use the same
word that everybody still uses for the thing. Right. Yeah, Well,
when when someone is calling the particular invention by a
different term, it's sort of implied that they didn't have
(17:50):
it figured out all the way, right even maybe even
if that person was more important in the in the
technological discoveries that led to the to the invention, right right, Yeah,
because ultimately, yeah, that the spread of the name is
tied with the spread of the idea. I feel like
we have repeatedly run into this in invention history, where
you know, somebody else's work was more pivotal, but ultimately
(18:12):
credit goes to the person who came up with the word.
But then, the other point is that the new word
also makes other scientists more likely to remember and discuss
your hypothesis or discovery, because it's easier to talk about
when it has a name, especially if it has a
catchy name. Uh So more rights. He gives an example quote.
(18:32):
It is said that kur at All, in their landmark
nineteen seventy two paper, coined the term apoptosis, and of
course that means um, you know, programmed cell death within
the body uh from the Greek apo meaning from and
potosis meaning falling uh to sound similar to necrosis, it's
biological counterpart. Though at the time more than a few
(18:55):
scientists doubted that the new word was anything more than
an impostor disguising a specific case of necrosis. It's certainly
helped to catapult the concept into new realms of attention
and hence testability. So this is interesting. It's like if
you're a scientist, you've got a new phenomenon you you
think you've discovered, or a hypothesis you want more people
(19:17):
to investigate. If you come up with a good word
for it, other scientists are more likely to pay attention
and start putting your idea to the test. In a
weird way. To come back to the invention parallels, it's
very much like branding and marketing. Yeah, I think evolution
is another great example of this. You know, like the
term uh so nicely sums up what is otherwise a
(19:42):
fairly complicated process that might not roll off the tongue
as easily. Oh and this was huge at the time,
with you know, Darwin agonizing over what was the best
terminology to use to explain in a simple way his
complex ideas, Like there was the competition within the theory
for you know, was it better to call it natural
(20:03):
selection or survival of the fittest. We have an episode
of stuff to blow your mind where we talk about
just like the fight back and forth between those two
terms which sort of described the same thing, but they
have different marketing appeals. Now, the other side of the
coin and all of this is is that why while
the use of words like this can certainly make it
easier to communicate about topics within the sciences, there's there
(20:27):
is evidence to indicate that it can in some cases
make it harder for those outside the field to understand
what's being discussed. Uh. And then this can often result
in a in a lack of interest in science or
politics is another example that's brought up or a feeling
that one is not good at science or politics, you
know and so so not not an idea that you
(20:48):
don't understand it and maybe you can't understand it. Um.
This according to a fairly recent study from Hilary Shulman,
Assistant Professor of Communication at the Ohio State University. UM,
you just came out in a patst couple of months. Basically,
the idea is that the the specialized terms they're looking at,
we're proving to be a stumbling block to interest. And
(21:08):
this of course just drives home the importance of science
communication and journalism in the fields of science and politics,
because obviously you need those specialized terms within science, within
the sciences, within like you know, academic discussion of politics, etcetera.
But then if you were going to convey those ideas
to the to the world outside of that in group,
(21:31):
you have to have more generalized terminology. You have to
find to have a way of reaching him, at least
until those terms become so widely used that you don't
have to worry about it, right, I mean, yeah, I
mean there are different considerations in play in these different
types of communication. I mean in scientific publications. Yeah, you
would waste a lot of space if you couldn't use
technical jargon. It just like allows you to say a
(21:54):
lot more in a lot less words, right, And a
lot of this also comes down to intended audience as well, Like, uh,
you know, the average person on the street is not
the intended reader for an academic neuroscience paper. Likewise, I
am not the the intended listener for a you know,
a very specific nineties dance hall uh reggae tune. You know. Um,
(22:17):
I have to come to it as an outsider. And
now it's possible that you know, years or decades down
the road, some of those terminal terms become part of
the general lexicon in either example. But it's not necessarily
going to be the case. Now there are examples, clearly,
I think where what you're talking about, though, where technical
language is just purely counterproductive, or at least counterproductive given
(22:41):
what somebody might state their their aims are, maybe not
to what their actual aims are. Joe, are you saying
that it's time to synergize backwards overflow? I think it's
time to talk a little bit about corporate speak. Yeah.
Uh so, of course one of my favorite sources of
everyday comedy and shame is corporate speak, this vast, shallow
cool of business neologisms that I sometimes imagine us just
(23:04):
sort of spending our days ladling over one another, like
so much stagnant pond water. We have to swim through
it from time to time. Yeah, And there was recently
a really excellent article I thought on corporate speak in
New York Magazine. It was from February of this year,
so by Molly Young called garbage language. Why do corporations
(23:24):
speak the way they do? Uh? In my opinion, this
was a very funny and insightful article on on the
phenomena of business buzzwords, which she calls garbage language, taking
the term from a novelist, and by that you might
guess where she stands on the subject. And of course
this kind of language is easy to hate, but that
doesn't make her wrong. She begins with an example of
(23:45):
a corporate word that she encountered at a startup where
she recently worked. Quote. The term was parallel path. And
I first heard it in this sentence, we're waiting on
specs from the San Francisco installation. Can you pari well
path two versions? Translated, this means we're waiting on specs
(24:05):
from the San Francisco installation? Can you make two versions?
So she summarizes, in other words, to parallel path is
to do two things at once. That's all. But it
gives it this kind of It almost has like a
Buddhist air to it. Right, there's a middle path, parallel paths.
It sounds far more peaceful than can you do twice
(24:26):
as much work as we originally talked about. I'm sure
you know you've probably heard me complain about this on
one of our shows before. This kind of thing is
so annoying to me, and I want to be clear,
I understand the creation of new technical terms in business
when they function the way that words normally do, right
by putting a concise name to something that would otherwise
(24:46):
require more explanation. And I think there are plenty of
perfectly legitimate business terms that are actually useful, and they
could be compared to specific technical jargon, and like medicine
or the science is one example. Here might be the
original use of disruption or disruptive. Like originally this referred
to a specific thing. It wasn't a new word, but
(25:06):
it was a word that gained a new usage in
a business context. And uh, this was coined by a
guy named Clayton Christensen in the nineties, and it referred
to like an innovation that creates a new market and
a new type of value, displacing old markets and old values.
So an example might be the mass production of automobiles
(25:27):
with the Model T, which isn't just a new competitor
and entering a market, but it completely kind of disrupts
the transportation market. It, you know, upsets the old like
traditional horse and buggy market. Uh. But even with this word,
which originally I think has a specific meaning and is useful,
I think there's a kind of semantic creep, right, whereover
time its meaning becomes less specific and people start using
(25:50):
the word disruption or disruptive to just refer to any
business innovation or maneuver that they want to be seen
as new and dynamic. It's like it's like using the
word like powerful or strong. You see people describing business
things as disruptive that are in no way really changing markets,
are creating new markets. They're just like they're just saying, like,
(26:13):
you know, we're gonna be big, We're gonna spend a
lot of money on this and enter the market. So
some words really have a meaning, But at the same time,
a lot of corporate speak just feels like replacing one
number of normal, understandable words with an equal number or
more of confusing, buzzy technical words. There's no efficiency advantage
(26:33):
in the communication. The communication becomes understandable by a smaller
number of people. Why does this happen well? With regard
to the idea of a parallel path, Young continues quote,
I thought there was something gorgeously and inadvertently candid about
the phrases assumption that a person would ever not be
doing more than one thing at a time in an office.
(26:55):
It's denial that the whole point of having an office
job is to multitask in effectively instead of single tasking effectively.
Why invent a term for what people were already forced
to do? It was, and it's fakery and puffery and
lack of a reason to exist. The perfect corporate neologism
now hold on. One can multitask and effectively at home
(27:17):
as well as in the office. That's quite true. I
think we can all attest to that. But but no,
I get their point here. As she discusses a bunch
more examples, I think I'd say the article is very
worth reading. And of course she's fairly merciless and hypothesizing
the reasons these terms are often used. For example, she
says that you know, some corporate speak simply reflects a
(27:37):
desire to reimagine exactly what type of work it is
you're doing and what that work means. She says, quote,
our attraction to certain words surely reflects an inner yearning.
Computer metaphors appeal to us because they imply futurism and
hyper efficiency, while the language of self empowerment hides a
deeper anxiety about our relationship to work, a sense that
(28:00):
what we're doing may actually be trivial, that the reward
of free snacks for cultural fealty is not an exchange
that benefits us, that none of this was worth going
into student debt for, and that we could be fired
instantly for complaining on Slack about it. And she ends
this uh string of thoughts by saying, empowerment language is
a self marketing asset as much as anything else, a
(28:23):
way of selling our jobs back to ourselves. I think
there's a lot of truth to that. Yeah, yeah, And
a lot of times it does seem very you know,
intentionally euphemistic, you know, to try to having to explain
describe something in terms that are less damaging or more positive.
(28:44):
Like one example that comes to mind is is something
that's used a lot in business speaking, that's pivoting, you know,
pivoting to video, for example, which sounds a lot better
than you know, drastically or recklessly changing course or being
thrown in the throne off course by you know, the
slightest change and the winds of of of public demand
(29:06):
and business. That sort of thing, Uh, pivot sounds like
very geometric, you know, it sounds very precise and premeditated.
It's what your office chair does when you turn to
look at your other monitor, an obvious one about obvious.
One of these euphemisms is just trying to cover up
hard truths. Is like when I don't know all of
(29:26):
the buzzy corporate words for basically firing people. Oh yeah, like,
are you gonna fire people? Are you going to terminate people?
Are you going to engage in a strategic head count reduction?
Or a new one? This was one that only came
out recently to my knowledge, employment dislocation, which when I
first read it, I had no idea what it meant.
I was like, oh, I guess they moved their jobs
(29:48):
to another city, like there's there's a geographic change, and
maybe it wasn't that bad. And I think, now what
we're talking about is just people being terminated. I mean,
but but then again, you know, look at it from
a business's standpoint and like, no, what business is going
to you know, send out a corporate email and begin
by saying, who, we just really had a blood bath. Everybody.
(30:11):
If you're reading this, you're all right, but you know, no, no,
nobody's gonna engage in that kind of uh, you know,
intercommunication about what has happened or out of communication you're
you're you're gonna want to put a positive spin on
it and leave the negative interpretations to other folks to do.
What do you know? One of the worst things about
(30:32):
this type of language is as much as I hate it,
I sometimes find myself unconsciously using it in work emails
and stuff I don't mean to, but it infects you.
Here's the Well, here's one that we've I've seen used
to hear at work from time to time. What happens
when a new podcast or even an older podcast UH
is not living up to expectations? Well, do you just
(30:56):
cancel it? Do you terminate it? Or do you son
set it? That's one of those great examples. Yeah. Well,
one of the things that Young talks about a lot
in the article is the recent explosion of new ag
language in UH in business, you know, corporate speak, Like
there are these phases where corporate speak in the eighties
(31:16):
was infected with all these Wall Street style terms, and
in the nineties there was a lot of there was
a lot of like war and battle type language in
corporate speak. And for some reason, now we're in an
age of new age kind of mystical corporate speak. Are
they saying things like, alright, it's time to really open
up the chakras on this new ad campaign. I think
(31:38):
there are some things like that. I think a lot
of it probably comes from the tech world actually, where
they're you know, there are a ton of people in
the tech world who are also plugged into like Eastern
religion and stuff, so so I guess you could say
a lot of it is is tied to in these
cases to putting a new spin on something that is familiar. Uh,
Like taking something that may seem even exotic and using
(31:59):
that is a way to recast something that is for
far more ordinary. Yeah, I think there there are several
reasons we can come away with here why we often
see the introduction of neologisms in the corporate world. One
is to sort of reimagine or put a new psychological
spin on what it is you're doing that you know,
makes it feel maybe more spiritual, or makes it feel
(32:20):
more combative or something whatever it is that gets you
amped up. Another is to be euphemistic, to like to
take hard truths and make them sound like something different
than they are. And then I would say there is
another one, which is just a desire to sound professional,
like there's this idea that okay, where are people definitely
(32:41):
doing real work. One place you know that they're doing
that is like in the sciences and in engineering and stuff,
and they have lots of technical jargon, you know. But
in the sciences and engineering you probably need a lot
of technical jargon that is not actually there's nothing equivalent
to it that's necessary in a normal office. But you
(33:02):
have this desire to feel like you are accomplishing things
at the same level as the sciences are in engineering.
And then of course to come back to politics, and
politics is very much an example of of of of
a situation where you're needing to continually spin things, uh,
either in one direction or the other and uh, and
in doing so you come up with different different terminologies
(33:25):
to different descriptions of of what of things that are
essentially the same. Yes, I think that fits more in
with the the one about you know, wanting to reimagine
your job or sell your job back to yourself with
you know, new uh corporate neologisms because they help you
feel a certain way. You know, in politics, obviously you're
trying to make other people feel a certain way about
(33:47):
a concept by using pushy terminology about it all right,
we're gonna take one more break, but when we come back,
you know, we're gonna get into a little bit of
science fiction e territory here as we look at a
couple of examples of of new words that came up
on us and and some of their their their fictional origins,
but also some of the fictional engines that help them
(34:11):
reach their place in our lexicon. Alright, we're back, So
we're going to talk about a couple more interesting examples
of invented words and what they tell us about the
you know, the the process by which words are coined.
The next one I think is interesting because it's common
(34:31):
usage is so uh intention with the spirit of its coinage.
And that word is robot, right and boy, And this
is one that is um. Robot is so broadly used
these days to things that are perhaps not technically robots
get called robots um, and the things that sometimes things
(34:52):
that are for all intents and purposes robots don't get
called robot. It's uh, it's it's a weird one. So
will be a wonderful journey. So you could be forgiven
for assuming that the word robot was coined by an inventor, right,
somebody who maybe somebody who made automata or somebody who
created an early autonomous machine. But no, not at all.
(35:14):
This invented word, like so many others we have discussed,
actually comes from a work of fiction. That work was
a play called are You Are, which stood for Rossom's
Universal Robots. And this was a play written by the
check writer and intellectual Karl Choppeck. It premiered in nineteen one,
and it's basic plot was that an inventor named Rossum
(35:37):
creates a series of artificial humans to serve as slaves
for regular humans. But these slaves ultimately revolt against their
human creators and they basically kill all the humans and
they take over, and then they find out, oh no,
we don't know how to make more of ourselves. But
these slaves in the play are known as robots. And
(35:58):
this word is not invented out of whole cloth. It's
adapted from a check word. I think that comes from
an old Slavonic term. Uh. The word is robot to
r O b O t a, which means forced labor
or servitude. It is the kind of labor that would
have been done by surfs under feudalism. Now, of course,
(36:18):
this idea of a robot is somewhat different from what
it usually means today. Today, a robot is generally some
kind of machine that operates with some degree of independence
and moves with some degree of freedom, mimicking human or
animal movement. You can tell from what I just said,
of course, that the concept is actually a little bit hazy,
(36:39):
even though it is so widely used. But the robots
in Shopics Play, while they are manufactured products, are not
depicted as being mechanical machines made out of metal. They're closer,
I think, to the replicants of Blade Runner. They are
sort of like basically humans in every respect, except they
are manufactured instead born, And the comparison to Blade Runner
(37:02):
is very close when you look at some of the
texts in the play. For example, there's this part where
there's a triumphal speech given by a robot named Radius
after he and the other robot rebels sees power from
the humans. Roddy As says, quote, the power of man
has fallen. By gaining possession of the factory, we have
become masters of everything. The period of mankind has passed away.
(37:26):
A new world has arisen. Mankind is no more mankind
gave us two little life. We wanted more life. Oh man,
that's Roy Batty, right, yeah, you can just you can
envision him giving that speech. And so it makes me
think that Are you Are must have directly inspired Blade Runner. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
certainly really Scott's adaptation of the original Philip K. Dick,
(37:50):
Uh do Android's stream of Electric Sheep. But I don't
think that line is in the Philip K. Dick. I don't.
It's when a long time, so they're reddit, but I don't.
I don't remember that as being parted. Like I remember
picking up that is. I think that was the first
phil K Dick book I read, and my experience was
probably like a lot of people would pick it up
expecting Blade Runner at the film and it's you get
(38:10):
something different. Is there are a lot of differences between
the novel and the book is great, but oh it's wonderful.
It's very different. It's very different. The book is wonderful
for the kind of state of unreality that it conjures
because of like the moments where the main character starts
to wonder if he is real or not. It's very
Philip K. Dick I was. I would remember being so
(38:30):
excited to read Blade Runner that I even read another
another novel that was called Blade Runner. There was like
a futuristic sci fi world about. It had to do
with like a medical um, a medical black market, like
generally somebody who's running like surgical blades. Did this come
out after the movie? This was like, I'm not sure
(38:50):
when it came out. I just remember finding a what
felt like an old book in my school library and
I was like, all right, it's close enough, I'll read
the whole thing. So I remember being entertaining, but it
also not Late Runner. Well, anyway, I was reading a
good article about this in the m I. T Press
by a Penn State professor named John im Jordan's uh.
(39:11):
And Jordan lays out some interesting context for are you
are uh? He writes of Choppe quote. Like many of
his peers, he was appalled by the carnage wrought by
the mechanical and chemical weapons that marked World War One
as a departure from previous combat. He was also deeply
skeptical of the utopian notions of science and technology. And
(39:31):
you should remember that this was a time of great
technological utopianism. You know, remember our episodes on the invention
of the supposed death ray in this period, which despite
the name, was actually pitched as something beautiful and humane.
It was a technology that would end all possibility of war,
It would bring about an era of peace and harmony.
(39:52):
And the death ray was by far, you know, not
the only example. This was the time of you know,
Tesla and Marconi in so many others fielding the idea
that coming technologies would eliminate war and disease and want.
But of course there were many others like Chopek who
reacted to the technological horrors of World War One with
skepticism about the promises of of new science and technology.
(40:15):
Uh and so, yeah, he's criticizing this idea of of
science that is that is not concerned with big questions,
or with ethics, or or even the the ultimate purpose
of its own endeavor, That is just concerned with like
what sort of leverage it can have over the physical world,
what can you produce? But Jordan's characterizes chop x opinion
(40:35):
on mechanization by saying, quote, when mechanization overtakes basic human traits,
people lose the ability to reproduce, as robots increase in capability, vitality,
and self awareness, humans become more like their machines. Humans
and robots, in chop x critique are essentially one and
the same. The measure of worth industrial productivity is one
(40:57):
by the robots that can do the work of two
and half men. Such a contest implicitly critiques the efficiency
movement that emerged just before World War One, which ignored
many essential human traits. Of course, this makes me think
about Dune, right, the implications of the past but lerry
a jihad, that's right, hey, when which humans rise up
(41:18):
against the rule of machines. But it's implied, it's certainly
in the original books that it's not just a it's
not simply a matter of rising up against machine overlords
in the physical totalitarian sense, but in a philosophical sense,
the idea that the machine way of life, the machine
way of thinking, has corrupted what it is to be
(41:39):
human exactly. Yes, it's not just that they're like, you know,
enemies that are trying to rule us. They've changed our
nature and we don't want that. Yeah. But anyway, given
the views of the play, there's just some intense irony
that this is actually the terminology that was adopted by
people who would end up wanting to make autonomous machines
for a living, like you know. And of course I
(42:00):
don't think there's anything wrong with wanting to go into robotics.
I think robots canna have a lot of wonderful uses. Yes, certainly.
But the term you're using is saying like I want
to go into robotics, is like literally like I want
to go into creating slaves that will destroy our spirit
and render us useless. Yeah, that's fascinating. One last thing
about the word robot. It's pronunciation also appears to have
(42:22):
changed over time. At various times it might have been
pronounced more like a robot robot? Is it ever bot?
Was it ever pronounced robot like Zoidberg does its futurama?
I think maybe at some point it was there. There
have been multiple different ways of saying now speaking of
technological fear and apprehension. Um, the next word we're going
to consider here is is a perfect extension of this
(42:44):
and ties into some of these same themes, and that
is of course clone. So clone was apparently first recorded,
uh to have been used somewhere between nineteen and nineteen
o five, and it's from the Greek word clone, a
slip a twig with clear botanical roots. Here. Plant physiologist
(43:07):
Herbert J. Webber coined the term in reference to the
technique for propagating new plants UH through the use of cuttings, bulbs,
and buds. And I was reading about this, UH in
an interview that Science Friday in their Science Diction series
UH conducted with Harold Marco, professor of History of Medicine
(43:27):
at the University of Michigan, and Ann Arbor UH. And
one thing that Marco pointed out is that Webber was
kind of trying to decide what term to use, Like
you didn't just fire from the hip here and think,
all right, what is the what? What? What words should
I use? Maybe with some of those considerations we talked
about earlier exactly. Yeah. So one of the other, like
major contender that he came up with is actually pretty great. Uh.
(43:51):
It is the word strength, a combination of strain and wraith. Wow.
But he, you know, decided it was too clumsy. But
that being said, I want there's got to be a
sci fi treatment out there, UM, somewhere where someone has
decided to abandon the word clone and just talk about streiths. UH.
Like that that just changes the whole situation. Imagine, if
(44:13):
you will, if throughout the Star Wars universe, instead of
saying clone, they said straight yeah, like that would have
had it would have made it feel it would have
been rooted in the actual origin of our usage of clone,
but it would have given it this slightly different feel
and indeed strength with its Wraith connotation. It feels a
little weird or like it's more in line with well,
(44:36):
it's good to come back to Herbert. The use of
the golas in Dune, you know where you know, it
doesn't it doesn't call them clones, It call you know,
calls them goulas, creates this new word that drags in
other um, other you know, feelings, other words, other connotations.
So um and anyway, Marco, you know, as this concept
(44:57):
steadily took off, you saw it u a lot in
the agricultural world world because that's of course where it
was originally utilized. But then it bleeds over into science fiction. However,
there are cases where you could have seen someone use
clone a lot more of where they did. In for instance,
Huxley in Brave New World doesn't refer to it as cloning,
(45:18):
refers to instead as the Bakonovsky process. But uh, but
Market points to two specific uses of clone in the
nineteen seventies that really helped to push it into the
popular lexicon, the first of which is Alvin and Heidi
Toffler's best seller Future Shock from the year nineteen seventy.
(45:39):
I know you like this and the Weird Orson Welles documentary. Yeah,
the weird the weird Horson Weil documentary, which I recommend
looking up on YouTube, is great and a little bit cheesy.
The work of the Tofflers throughout their career, they wrote
various texts of futurism, texts where they're talking about, you know,
trends and how we how we um anticipate and receive
(46:00):
new technologies, and generally the idea of future shock is
the idea that the world is changing so rapidly, there's
all these new technologies coming online that it overwhelms us
and we feel the sense of future shock. Uh And
and even today it's a you know, it's it's a
work that is to a certain extent dated by their
later works. You know that they spent their their lives,
(46:20):
they spent their careers covering this, uh, this area of
consideration but it's still a very readable text, and I
recommend it that this is a This is a line
from Future This is a paragraph from Future Shock, where
the Tofflers discuss this quote. One of the more fascinating
possibilities is that man will be able to make biological
carbon copies of himself through a process known as cloning.
(46:41):
It will be possible to grow from the nucleus of
an adult sell a new organism that has the same
genetic characteristics of the person contributing the cell nucleus. The
resultant human copy would start life with a genetic endowment
identical to that of the donor, although cultural differences might
thereafter alter personality or physical development of the clone. And
(47:04):
uh Interestingly enough, in that Science Friday interview, Howard Marcle
pointed to another work from the seventies, this time of
fictional work venties six novel by Ira Levin, The Boys
from Brazil. Oh, the one about don't they want to
clone Another Hitler? Yeah, it's a It concerns a a
fictional plot where you have uh not Nazi ex pats
(47:26):
living in South America who are hatching a scheme to
clone at off Hitler. Uh, you know, using cloning technology
to create all of these uh the these these male children,
and then trying to figure out how to raise them
so that you can nurture their genetic legacy into you know,
I guess the ideal form of the fere um, which
(47:46):
I know. There are a lot of problems with this plot,
a lot of holes in this plot, but it was
a very popular work and they made a pretty uh
I remember being a pretty entertaining film version of this
as well, and which Greg Repact plays uh uh Dr
Joseph Mangela, but also Laurence Olivier is the good guy,
right hunter um yeah, And so I I have very
(48:10):
vague memories of this film. I think I saw it
on American movie Classics back in the day, but I
remember it. I remember it being disturbing and effective in places.
I never read the book myself, but I was leafing.
I picked up grabbed a copy of it and leaf
through it before we were we recorded this with this episode,
and I did run across the passage where one character
is telling another about the origin of the word clone
(48:32):
and referring to the uh you know, the Greek and
the uh and the the the botanical origins of the term.
Uh So, anyway, I guess the idea here is that,
you know, you have two popular works that are using
the word clone, and they helped to sort of boost
the signal throughout uh, you know, the fictional world and
just the the the popular conceptions of the science itself.
(48:55):
One of the funny things though, in this selection you
pulled out is that one character says that the old
word for cloning was mono nuclear reproduction, and then complains,
why would you coin a new word like clone when
the old ones convey more? The other character says, cloning
is shorter. Oh, yes, how true coloss Uh yeah, and uh.
I was going to actually read this this uh this
(49:17):
bit from the Boys from Brazil, but I thought it
might be a little confusing because the the character that
is explaining it mentions a different biologists and mentions in
English biologists by the name of Haldane, which I thought
might confuse people who were listening to the origin story
that we've presented thus far. Okay, well, I hope I
(49:38):
didn't confuse anybody. But I like how they reproduced the
same conversation. It's interesting and it is again worth I think,
stressing the importance of science fiction especially with scientific terminology,
because there are plenty of other examples where a bit
uh like an idea is presented first in science fiction
and then gets picked up as a possibility within the sciences. Yeah,
(50:02):
you might think that somebody created a robot and then
came up with the name robot, but no, yeah goodness.
And this is without even getting into the situation where
you have fictional worlds that in which the creator comes
up with their own lexicon for like a an alternate
reality or futuristic reality like one of them. Think the
more jarring examples of this would be a clockwork orange
(50:26):
or inn In Banks wrote a book called Fearsome Engine
that is totally a totally um worthwhile read. But it
has like I think, three different perspectives in it, and
one of them is a is is is written in
this futuristic slang, and it's really really takes a little
bit of getting used to before you're rolling with it
(50:47):
and understanding what the character is saying. Um now, I
don't know. I mean, it's arguable to what extent those
kind of exercises ever actually produced new words, but there's
certainly the potentiality is there, um, you know, any time
any time a new word is presented, you're you're putting
out the possibility that it could, uh, it could become
(51:08):
a part of language itself. Yeah, I guess, so, I
guess you can't know what uh, you can't know when
you're making a word happen? Right? Can you introduce something
and it's like, I don't know, it's it's in their
hands now? Yeah? All right, Well, you know, hopefully this
we received a lot of great feedback from our previous
episode on invented words, so hopefully we'll hear a lot
of great feedback on this episode as well. We would
(51:31):
obviously love to hear everyone's thoughts on on new words
that they've picked up, new words that you've rejected, or
are there words from science fiction specifically that you find
yourself using within a particular in group or a fandom.
Are there are there some that you wish would be
picked up by the by the wider world at large?
What are the worst business neologisms you've to deal with
(51:54):
on a regular basis? Please share those with us for sure?
Or the best you know? Again, I don't want to
deny sometimes they might be useful. Sometimes they're very useful,
all right, you say with utter despair. No all right.
In the meantime, if you want to check out other
episodes of Invention, you will find this show anywhere you
get your podcasts, wherever that happens to be. Just make
(52:17):
sure you rate, review and subscribe. If you go to
invention pod dot com, that will also shoot you over
to the I heart listing for this show. Huge thanks
as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hi,
you can email us at contact at invention pod dot com.
(52:41):
Invention is production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts
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Invention News
Hosts And Creators
Robert Lamb
Joe McCormick
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