I contributed thelcome, a word I coined in 1991 (and other people have independently arrived at). It came from my slip of the tongue when trying to respond to a very complimentary thank you. Here’s the definition I put on Pseudodictionary in 2003:

thelcome – A reply to a complimentary “thank you,” where both “thank you” and “you’re welcome” seem appropriate responses. [Blend of "thank you" and "you're welcome"]

e.g., She said, “Thanks so much! You’re such a wonderful person!” “Thelcome,” I replied.

After Erin McKean’s article came out, I was happy to see thelcome mentioned on Stan Carey’s language blog. He’s in Ireland, so the march toward worldwide thelcome-acceptance proceeds apace. (Next stop: the Pitcairn Islands, where, unlike the U.S., it’s summer now.)

As for the other neologisms in the article, I think Kate Greene’s technoschmerz could catch on. It’s similar to weltschmerz (borrowed from German, literally ‘world pain’), but the emotional pain comes from irksome technology rather than the dismal world. Also, Kate Chmiel’s term for factory-made apple pies, exstrudel, is delectably unappetizing (and presumably a smooth blend of extrude and strudel).

I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that my favorite coinages are both from Kates. And that my name, Kevin, also starts with K. And that their words end with Schmerz and Strudel, both German masculine nouns starting with S. And that I’m a part-German male person whose (non-German) last name, Sullivan, also starts with S.

One probably has to be somewhat form-focused to be a neologizer, but I think it’s time to put language back in the toy box for today.

googleganger
'goohguhlganguh [American dialects end in "-ur" for many]

noun a person with the same name as oneself, whose online references are mixed with one’s own among search results for one’s name.

[google + (doppel)ganger]

By the way, I’m not the Kevin Sullivan who wrote, directed, and produced the Canadian Anne of Green Gables television movies.

Macquarie Dictionary also has people’s choice awards in 18 categories.

See more years plus UK and American words of the year on my site:

UK and Australian English Words of the Year (since 2006)

• Language Expert Susie Dent of Oxford University Press (OUP), United Kingdom
• Macquarie Dictionary, Australia

American English Word of the Year (since 1990)

• American Dialect Society (ADS)
• Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary
• New Oxford American Dictionary
• Webster’s New World College Dictionary

Steven and Brandon have a misunderstanding. Can you spot the ambiguity?

Link to video

Closed-captioning (CC) and transcript available.

After a short, original light-verse poem, hear about Christmas and Japanese New Year’s and learn some Japanese words related to New Year’s.

Link to video

Closed-captioning (CC) and transcript available.

You can also get a word a day by following darewords on Twitter. I have.

How to write the next great alien language (io9.com on J.R.R. Tolkien’s Elvish and Marc Okrand’s Klingon)

Linguist Marc Okrand on how he used less common sounds/grammatical forms to make Star Trek’s Klingon language more alien:

Link to video

More resources:

• Mark Rosenfelder’s The Language Construction Kit (LCK)
• expanded book form of The Language Construction Kit (LCK)
• The Lingua Descriptive Studies Questionnaire
• Speculative Grammarian’s satirical look: A Primer in SF Xenolinguistics

I just got the new The Yahoo! Style Guide: The Ultimate Sourcebook for Writing, Editing, and Creating Content for the Digital World (about half of which is online for free).

The first thing I wanted to check was the word usage section to see how things have changed since the most recent Microsoft style guide: Microsoft Manual of Style for Technical Publications, Third Edition (2004). Below are some differences in the specific spelling of words (though Microsoft wouldn’t necessarily change these items in a future fourth edition of their guide).

I always thought the Web site/webmaster spelling contrast was a silly inconsistency. I’m glad Yahoo agrees.

In the following video from The Wall Street Journal’s D: All Things Digital conference in June 2010, lexicographer and Wordnik CEO Erin McKean demonstrates how Smartwords allows someone to get lengthy definitions for technical terms, buy books on searched concepts, and get quizzed on words for the college entrance exam (hat tip to VentureBeat).

Link to video

The video below from O’Reilly’s TOC Conference (Tools of Change for Publishing Conference) in February 2010 is disappointingly vague, but the main point is that the Smartwords platform lets you learn (about words):

• where they are and
• where they came from
• when they are
• how they relate to other words
• who created them and
• who they’re with now

I take this to mean the contexts, connotations, collocations (words that co-occur), and other connections among words. I would dub this “Word Con 4,” but one is a col- and it might also sound like a word conference or a lexical DEFense CONdition for shooting language-maven missiles (after eating and before leaving) at people who misuse too many words.

Link to video

These are exciting times for how we access words and information. Once we reach the immersive hologram phase I suppose tagged words will have avatars to come by and explain themselves to us. “Wrestling with” a new concept could cause injuries without proper safety protocols, and “wrapping your head around” an idea might make for an unflattering online video of you.

Side note:

Erin McKean (her Twitter) uses delightful analogies. Below are two talks she has given about dictionaries.

2007 TED Talk on redefining the dictionary

Link to video

2007 talk at Google on what one should know about dictionaries (almost 55 minutes)

Link to video

This is Part 2 (Part 1) on finding early uses of American slang and colloquialisms from the television clips and episodes on Hulu‘s (language corpus of) shows from NBC Universal (NBC, USA Network, Bravo, Sci Fi, Sundance Channel, Oxygen) and News Corp. (Fox, FX, Fuel TV).

While searching in vain for the Steve Martin “NOT!” clip on Hulu for the Part 1 post, I found another “The Nerds” sketch from Saturday Night Live and stumbled on an old usage of yet another expression. This time it was post-adjective much? (e.g. “Awkward much?” for “You’re very awkward”).

I first noticed post-adjective much? in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer pilot, (“Welcome to the Hellmouth,” Season 1, Episode 1; first aired March 10, 1997). Cordelia (Charisma Carpenter) informs Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar) that there has been a mysterious death at their high school. Buffy wants to find out if it was the work of a vampire without blowing her secret identity:

BUFFY: How did he die?

CORDELIA: I don’t know.

BUFFY: Well, were there any marks?

CORDELIA: Morbid much? I didn’t ask!

(Welcome to the Hellmouth, 15:37-15:43, hulu.com/watch/48/buffy-the-vampire-slayer-welcome-to-the-hellmouth [EDIT (6/7/10): no longer available])

The construction not surprisingly predates the show, but I was surprised to find it two decades earlier.

On SNL’s October 7, 1978, episode (Season 4, Episode 1), with The Rolling Stones as host, the teen nerds Lisa Loopner (Gilda Radner; William Safire (1992) spelled it “Lupner” in On Language; Not! New York Times Magazine. March 8, 1992, 20.) and Todd (Bill Murray) are hanging out in Lisa’s kitchen:

TODD: I really need your help with my history homework.

LISA: Well, Todd, you know if you sincerely need my help, you can count on it.

TODD: Oh, good. Because I’m studying all about [grabs at Lisa's shirt neck and tries to peek down her shirt] underdeveloped nations!

LISA (shouting and smiling): Cut it out, Todd! Cut it out! [lightly swats him away] Stop it!

TODD (points at Lisa’s chest and mock laughs to a pretend audience): Underdeveloped much?

(Nerds Broken Fridge, 02:37-02:55)

The bit is quite crass, of course, but there’s the post-adjective much? construction way back in 1978.

As if I couldn’t waste enough time watching comedy and other clips and episodes on Hulu, now I shudder to realize that there’s a corpus linguistics use as well. NOT! No, there truly is.

See also:
Gateway to Corpus Linguistics

Corpus.byu.edu (English, Spanish, and Portuguese online corpora)

Slayer Slang: A Buffy the Vampire Slayer Lexicon by Michael Adams (2004, Oxford University Press, ISBN13: 9780195175998)

I was sent an old clip of Saturday Night Live (SNL). The clip happened to contain a “Wayne’s World”-esque “NOT!” (e.g., “That sounds like fun—NOT!” for “That does not sound like fun”), but it’s thirteen years earlier.

I learned the post-clause NOT! expression from the “Wayne’s World” segments on SNL in early 1990. The sketches began at the beginning of the fifteenth season in Fall 1989, but I don’t think the post-clause NOT! appeared until the Tom Hanks-hosted February 17, 1990, episode (Season 15, Episode 13, video clip embedded below).

Tom Hanks plays Garth’s (Dana Carvey) cousin Barry, a roadie for Aerosmith. Barry has brought Aerosmith to appear on Wayne’s World, Wayne (Mike Myers) and Garth’s community-access cable show. After Barry demonstrates his roadie duties, comes:

WAYNE: Anyways, Barry, uh, that was really interesting. [mugging to camera] NOT!

(Waynes [sic] World with Aerosmith, 04:39-04:43)

With the movie Wayne’s World in 1992, the expression became even more popular. It even made the American Dialect Society’s 1992 Word of the Year. According to Sheidlower and Lighter (1993), however, the usage of post-clause NOT! is older than that:

The publicists for the movie Wayne’s World claim the construction was coined in the late 1970s by Steve Martin and Gilda Radner in “The Nerds,” an ongoing sketch on Saturday Night Live:

That’s a fabulous science fair project. . . . Not!

(Jesse T. Sheidlower and Jonathan E. Lighter (1993). A Recent Coinage (Not!). American Speech, 68(2) (Summer, 1993), 213-218 [first page].)

For the SNL quote, Sheidlower and Lighter cite a 1992 “On Language” column by William Safire. Safire calls it “belated negation” and gives the sketch as 1978.

(William Safire (1992). On Language; Not! New York Times Magazine. March 8, 1992, 20.)

That would be the April 22, 1978, episode (Season 3, Episode 18), with Steve Martin as host. That sketch doesn’t seem to be on Hulu. At any rate, at least my discovery is still a little older. The usage I stumbled on is from two years earlier.

In the very first season of SNL, the May 8, 1976, episode (Season 1, Episode 19) has Madeline Kahn as host. The show has a slumber party sketch about what a group of young girls think sex is:

MADELINE KAHN: That is why you should only do it after you are married. Because then you won’t be so embarrassed in front of your husband because you will [would?] be in the same family.

LARAINE NEWMAN (sarcastically, with only a slight pause): Oh, well. Now I really want to get married. Not!

(Slumber Party, 02:46-03:00.)

I can’t get too excited about this either, however. It turns out, according to Mark Israel (Postfix “not”), the construction is a lot older and goes back at least to 1905 with Ellis Parker Butler’s Irish English poem Pigs is Pigs (“. . . ‘Cert’nly, me dear frind Flannery. Delighted!’ Not!”).

Part 2:
Buffy (and SNL) ‘much’ much?: Slang research with Hulu.com, Part 2

See also:
Gateway to Corpus Linguistics

Corpus.byu.edu (English, Spanish, and Portuguese online corpora)