The Lexicon Con

“’sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me.’  Until they can.”

Tertiam Quidd.  P.642, The Moon Also Rises, A Failed Attempt to Become a Novelist.  1970, Downtown Riner Free Press, Riner, Virginia

The English language we use today has evolved to such an extent that we would not easily communicate with those who spoke it a mere 600 years ago.  Early influences upon English came by way of the Latin, French and German languages.  Old High German actually.  A bit of Old Norse shows up too.  And across the years many words from other languages have crept quietly into our lexicon.  More will come.  Many have already gone.  Read the English of Geoffrey Chaucer and you’ll need a special dictionary.  Go back to Beowulf and you’ll read about debauched Vikings saying stuff like “monegum magnum maedothla offtaken” as they swilled Meade bashed each other over the head with barstools.    Stuff even a Scotsman would find hard to say.  Yet it’s all good, it’s natural and it makes the language alive and ever more colorful.  But I’ve discovered that unless you’re a president, just go ahead and try to invent a new word and successfully introduce it into the idiolect.   It becomes a damn thankless task for sure.  I’ve tried twice and found no takers other than myself. 

Yet along come two Republican presidents who can toss words out and coin new expressions as easily as a child tosses pennies into a wishing well.  Sploit!  President George W. Bush said “misunderestimate” several times in a speech and his incorrect utterance immediately became accepted.  If you had a good understanding of grammar though, it took some thinking to make certain you were actually understanding precisely what he meant by “misunderestimating.”  At first it sounds like a word that might have already been in the vocabulary, but it wasn’t.  Not until he said it.  It was an entirely new word and I must admit I took an inexplicable liking to it almost right away.  It’s not really a double negative, but it seems to be a very close first cousin.  Actually, misunderestimate means the very same thing that underestimate means, but with an accidental intimation that reinforces the idea that the said underestimation was absolutely the result of a mistaken perception.  And a really big one at that, for which a painful penalty could be paid.

Then along comes Donald Trump and he says “bigly.”  He turned an adjective into an adverb as easily as he lied about the size of the attendance to his inauguration or how his predecessor, “a sick man” as it were, wiretapped his phone.  He could have used a real adverb, like “very,” placed it in front of “big” and had himself a genuinely nice sentence to toss around.  But he didn’t, and he got away with it.  A few times anyway.  He seems to get away with a lot.  So never mind that we users of English had already usefully combined “big” and “time” into “big-time,” meaning exactly the same thing he meant when he uttered the not word,“bigly.”  But he didn’t use what we already had, though it was not likely a conscious decision on his part.  He made the new, useless and even a bit moronic sounding word: bigly. I’ve even heard it repeated several times albeit mostly by late night comedy TV show hosts or ordinary people enjoying a little Saturday night sarcasm at the president’s expense.  Yet nothing to it.  He said it, we repeated it, and the Oxford English Dictionary people may have to deal with it next year.

            Well before these two presidents started throwing out new words, however, I tried it myself.  Intentionally.  Carefully.  And with a plan.  The first word I tried to introduce was one that I made up completely by myself.  Made from scratch you could say, with no help from any already existing words like the way those two presidents did. 

The first word I invented was “prefrimilation.” Prefrimilation was intended to be a noun; a state of being if you will.  I just assumed nouns were a pretty logical entry level position into the word creation business.  You get a couple of new nouns under your belt and you can count on an engraved invitation to the American Etymological Society’s Annual Spring Cotillion.  At least I thought so at the time.

            Prefrimilation refers to that Nano second in which one consciously realizes the inevitable occurrence of sexual intercourse between one’s self and the person who’s currently making one feel all hot and bothered.  Initial usage would have taken place among young, unmarried individuals of either the same or opposite sexes.  I first attempted to introduce prefrimilation into the lexicon while I worked in broadcasting at a popular radio station.  Every week it was part of my job to create radio advertisements for one of the local drive-in movie theatres.  I thought I had the perfect venue.  Drive-ins always show movies where an event of prefrimilation is libel to take place, probably several times a night, and the parking lot is filled with unmarried couples working themselves and their partners toward the most glorious prefrimilation one could ever possibly imagine.  I think Meatloaf had a song about something like that. 

For one entire summer season, I worked my new word into ads for the movies being shown at that drive-in.  I got nowhere.  No one even asked about the strange word I know they’d never heard before in all their lives suddenly showing up every single week in movie ads.  I think they were too proud not to pretend they knew its meaning.  During the early autumn, I tried more bigly to get my new word out there, but evidently I misunderestimated the difficulty of artificially producing an entirely new word and having it accepted into the current lexis of 1978.  People back then were on the ball.

            Really, though, I believe it could have been any of a number of reasons, or even a combination of several that led to my lack of success in making “prefrimilation,” one of the exciting words that would have to have been used in seventh grade boys’ and girls’ health classes across the nation.  I could already hear the giggles as teachers explained the danger of allowing yourself to experience prefrimilation in the back seat of dad’s Buick.  They didn’t have a word like that when I went to school.  They still don’t, but it’s not my fault now is it.

            My next attempt at influencing the spoken and written language didn’t occur until the early years of the twenty-first century.  This time I was sure my chances of success were much greater because I was going to use nothing but existing words, never before arranged in precisely the way I was employing them, to create a fantastic new expression.  Noting how other words, even words of a completely opposite meaning, had come into favor being used as adjectives descriptive of the very same status of a certain person, place or thing. You know, “hot” and “cool” have both been used to imply that something or someone is very desirable.   And I wasn’t taking on anything that was going to be even nearly that difficult.  I was just replacing an old and often used expression with one, simultaneously both similar, yet refreshingly very different.  And I had no doubt that my vehicle of introduction this time around was absolutely perfect.  I had nurse Kellie Phibbs in the operating room; the perfect environment in which to grow my new expression.  I was certain I could carry the day this time.

            My new idiom was designed to replace this tired but true old one: “pisses me off.”  Now in England, Ireland and Scotland being “pissed” means being inebriated; nothing like upset or angry.  With my modernistic expression however, there could be no geographic differences in meaning, therefore making it much more pleasant to travel among the English speaking nations or nations that may actually have another language, but where English is pretty well understood.  So, I anticipated easily replacing “this pisses me off” with “this bottles my ass.”  Perfect, right?  You go out and say, “this really bottles my ass,” and people do a double take. They’re bound to remember you, what you said and why you said it because you used a colorful new and completely unexpected combination of words.  Never before, as far as I could determine, had the concept of a bottled behind ever been considered as being tantamount to anger or irritation.  But when you do consider it, you have to admit that a bottled ass could really be quite annoying, uncomfortable and something that might well lead to a whole lot of anger.  An expression truly appropriate to your state of disturbance rather than one that might actually imply relief from the stress of carrying around a full bladder.

            And Kellie Phibbs, whom I mentioned earlier, is recognized by all who know her as a champion of the impactful use of vulgar words, curse words and startling expressions of linguistic originality.  And she promised to help me bring my new expression into popular usage within the circle of her friends, coworkers and acquaintances.  From there, it would be just a simple matter of time until worldwide usage became a reality.  But once again, nothing happened.  Kellie still gets “pissed off” like always.  It seems her ass never gets bottled though, like I was expecting it would be. 

So here I am, stuck with one new word and one new expression and nothing to do with either of them.  I had already been considering immediate follow up with new expressions such as “like a pig on a raft,” and “worse than a donkey’s ass on July afternoon.”  But you can imagine how bigly those would go over after the gems I had offered had both fallen flat on my face.  “About as probable as finding a cockroach wearin’ camo,” I said to myself, now convinced that no one else wanted to hear me say it.  And as far as me ever even thinking about becoming president, well, that’s about as likely to happen for me now as experiencing prefrimilation in the morning.   So shitsticks I say, shitsticks.