The 9 Ways to Name Something New

We add about a 1000 words to the English lexicon every year. These new words and phrases come from slang naturally, but also culture, business, religion, technology and science — all aspects of life. There are also thousands of words added in other languages around the world — but no one really knows the number for sure.

The appearance of something new challenges our capacity for language. We’re lacking the vocabulary to describe a previously unknown thing or phenomena. We don’t have the words.

More often now, Presidents will cite new words like Remdesivir or new names like “Little Rocket Man” while advertisers create “Oh oh oh Ozempic” commercials.

In between is everyone else. High-schoolers to marketing strategists will require some sort of lexical invention and dexterity to uniquely express themselves or depict their new service.

Outpouring of New Words in 2020

We now know that neologisms during a Pandemic are common and also incredibly useful. Any one of us can quickly recall 10 new words and phrases from 2020 without much effort. We are seeing and certainly feeling newly-minted words introduced into our vocabularies at a heightened pace. The pandemic has offered up acronyms, abbreviations, portmanteaus and eponyms — only some have been documented, but expect more to come.

Especially from the good people at Merriam-Webster, Cambridge, Oxford, etc. — they are all preparing their collective top “2020 New Word Lists”. Every year these word-culture-nerds reward us with their research on new additions. Reminding us yet again on just how topsy-turvy of a year its been. There is little doubt that 2020 or more specifically the pandemic, will impact our lexicon on a generational scale.

In the UK, Collins Dictionary rightly citied “Lockdown” as their 2020 Word of the Year after seeing a 6000% increase since 2019. Collins defines Lockdown as “the imposition of stringent restrictions on travel, social interaction, and access to public spaces”. Sounds about right. In addition to the increase in use, Collins selected “lockdown” due to its global impact and “sense of shared experience”. The Brits also reported “TikTokker”, “self-isolate” and “Megxit” among their top so far.

Smartphones and Magic Lanterns

However word formation isn’t all that straightforward. Futurist Dr. James Martin once said that “we don’t have a language for the future”. Indicating that it’s not always immediately apparent what we should call the new thingamajig.

Your english teacher called them compound words, but word-mash-ups are only the beginning. We use all sorts of tools and techniques to further expand our language.

The car was initially the “horseless carriage”. The telephone was the “speaking telegraph”. Radio was “The Wireless” and the televisor’s “motion pictures over wireless” thankfully landed on TV. Projectors were “Magic Lanterns”, while smart + phone is debatable.

Technology seems to favor compound word formation. Automobile and telephone nicely describe the “what” but also the “how”. Yet there are many alternative examples, including my alma mater Intel — a lessor known portmanteaus of “Integrated Electronics”.

How to Create a Word

If you are in the market and looking to create a word in 2020 (or any other year for that matter) here are your options:

• Affixes — prefixes, suffixes and any other ixes. — democratize (1798), detonator (1822), preteen (1926). We got sleazy from sleaze. Also includes all “isms and ologys”.
• Portmanteaus — a blend of words: Smog (smoke + fog). Motel (motor + hotel).
• Compounds — skyscraper, mobilehome, or bailout — these mashups leverage root words to form a single entity, action or description.
• Borrowed words — Tomato from Nahuatl and shark from Mayan. Slogan comes from Irish, the Somoans gave us tattoos and the Polynesians’ taboo.
• Acronyms and Abbreviations — Cop a.k.a Constable On Patrol, so is “goodbye” for God-be-with-you.
• Resemblance — a big lifting machine used to build buildings… or “crane”. Computer mouse and VW Beetle. Called Repurposing by linguists.
• Eponyms — new words using people, places or things — Heimlich Maneuver — but also America, Caesar Salad, gun, dunce, bigot, hooligan, maverick, panic, silhouette, syphilis, and sideburns.
• Replication — Wiki — Hawaiian for quick — wiki-wiki. But also boo-boo, hip-hop and cray cray.
• Error — scramble may have come from scrabble for instance.

Words are identity

Word choice reflects much about its user. Not only into who you are, but insight into what you might do in the future. The electronic written word in particular offers endless breadcrumbs of data for researchers and marketers.

(Image: Ts’inúk w?aw?a — Pacific Northwest c. 1900s)

People write online reviews, answer surveys and email customer support. Businesses write press releases, post on social media and release annual reports. Newspapers have articles, movies have scripts, and songs have lyrics. All of these written words and text can be studied and measured as well as monetized.

Through linguistics, rhetoric and traditional discourse analysis, now super-charged with language understanding AI frameworks, researchers are advancing their understanding upstream and prediction downstream.

Artificial Intelligence, specifically Natural Language Understanding and Text Analytics techniques offer tremendous promise for learning, understanding and teaching. A growing capability, especially among marketing strategists and sales teams, to leverage NLU tools that fuel the engagement funnel. A process that informs strategy, generating targeted and personal content based on context, channel and stage.