The word is a powerful thing. The Bible contains the first story of Creation. In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless wasteland, and darkness covered the abyss, while a mighty wind swept over the waters.
Then God said, “Let there be light”, and there was light. God saw how good the light was. God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light “day” and the darkness he called “night. The very first word emanating from the mouth of God was perhaps the first miracle – the medium by means of which we can now see with our own eyes – everything in the universe that the Creator made for mankind (The New American Bible, 1971: 2).
After the man had been given life, the Lord God formed out of the ground various wild animals and various birds of the air and He brought them to the man to see what he would call them; whatever the man called each of them would be its name. The first coiner of words, therefore, was Adam.
The famous linguist, Otto Jesperson, may unwittingly echo this anecdote taken from the Bible when he points out that “with most of our common words like house, grass, green, bird, never, etc., they go back to immemorial times and the changes in sound and meaning can no more be traced back to any definite individual (Adam?), though scholars may be inclined to say that theoretically, the initiative must have come from one individual (God?) (Jesperson, 1929).
When someone shouts, “Look out!” and you duck just in time to avoid being hit by a thrown ball, you owe your escape from injury to the fundamental cooperative act by which most higher animals survive: namely, communication by means of noises. Although your nervous system did not record the danger, you were unharmed because another nervous system recorded it.
Most of the time we are listening to the noises made, we are drawing upon the nervous systems of others so as to make up what our own nervous systems have missed. Societies, both animal and human, might be regarded as huge cooperative nervous systems.
“While animals use only a few limited cries, human beings use extremely complicated systems of sputtering, hissing, gurgling, clicking and cooing noises called language, with which they express and report what goes on in their nervous systems. Language is, in addition to being more complicated, immeasurably more flexible than the animal cries from which it was developed – so flexible indeed that it can be used not only to report the tremendous variety of things that go on in their nervous systems. Language is, in addition to being more complicated, immeasurably more flexible than the animal cries from which it was developed – so flexible that it can be used not only to report the tremendous variety of things that go on in the human nervous system but to report those reports” (Hayakawa, 1941: 17).
It has just been mentioned that language is more flexible than the animal cries from which it was developed. An example of this would be the compound word, cock-a-doodle-doo, which stands for the sound made by a rooster greeting the dawn.
Language is the indispensable mechanism of human life – of life such as ours that is moulded, guided, enriched and made possible by the accumulation of the past experience of members of our species. Dogs, cats and chimpanzees do not increase their wisdom, their information, their control over their environment from one generation to the next. But human beings do. The cultural accomplishments of the ages and the discoveries of all the arts and sciences come to us as free gifts from the past. These gifts offer us not only the opportunity for a richer life but the chance to add to the sum total of human achievement, however small. This brings us again to the topic of word coinage.
There are many words that have been deliberate – coined in recent times and some have become extremely popular. Kodak – a mere arbitrary collection of sounds without any perceptible association with existing words – is now known all over the world and often used for “camera” in general.
A long string of words coined in recent times some more or less fancifully from names of planets or Greek goddesses is the following: helium from helios (sun); selenium from Selene (moon); and uranium from Uranus.
Spoof is the name of a game of hoaxing and nonsensical character and then as a general name for humbug or hoax.
Certain suffixes become the fashion and are used in an interesting number of new words. A case in point is – eria in recent American use; it began with cafeteria, a pseudo-Spanish word adopted in California and giving rise to a whole mania of new coinages: bacteria – a store where baskets are sold; chocolateria, fruitarian, etc.
One of the best examples of instant coinage that have been accepted by America is the gerrymander. In 1812, while Elbridge Gerry was Governor of Massachusetts, the Democratic Legislative in order to secure an increased representation in the State Senate, districted the State in such a way that the shape of the towns brought out a territory of irregular outline. This was indicated on a map. Stuart, the painter, observing it, added a head, wings and claws to it and exclaimed, “That will do for a salamander.” “Gerrymander!” said Russell and the word became a proverb. A recent newspaper competition to find a name for a person celebrating his birthday resulted in jubilar, a person who celebrates his jubilee.
We may also briefly refer to a similar jocular blending of two words as brunch from breakfast and lunch. Words fill our lives. The more concise and compact a word is, the easier and more efficient communication takes place.
Adults do not have the exclusive right to coin words. Although there have been instances where a single novelist applied himself to coining words as if in a factory, Some fifty words of his are still common property in the literary language. Bright children have been known to coin words on the spur of the moment.
A young nephew of mine, Jeremy, was watching his mother ironing clothes, asked her, “Mom, what are you ironing?” and she replied, “Your sister’s blush.” (a loan word from the Spanish language, meaning “blouse”.) The boy paused a minute and commented, “But it’s pink, not blue. That one (pointing to a blouse coloured blue) is blusa.” Here is an example of economy and compactness. Jeremy fused two words into one for more efficient communication. And from then on, his mother, to humour the boy, was henceforth careful to refer to blouses as blues, reds or greens, accordingly.
Another new-coined word of Jeremy’s is woot – his abbreviated form for “wooden foot” or pegleg. Actually, pegleg is a wooden substitute for a lower limb cut off by surgical means. The pegleg is a crude replacement of the original and installed to enable the person to walk ( no prosthetics in those days).
Children, by and large, love being told tales of piracy on the high seas. One day I told the boy the story of a pirate chieftain who lost his leg in battle wore a pegleg but whose name I had forgotten. “Could it have been Captain Hook?” I asked. “How about Captain Woot?” (from wood + foot), the child shyly suggested and Woot it came to be from then on.
Most probably, some of the earliest words coined were onomatopoeia. For instance, what could be more fitting than whoosh to denote the onrush of wind through an open door? Or swish to refer to the lapping of waves against the shore. Also animal sounds as bow-wow and meow. Such words we owe to Mother Nature and are perhaps the oldest the world has ever known.