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  RESISTING THE PRIMAL URGE

  In his Essay on Criticism, Alexander Pope encouraged fellow poets to let the onomatopoeia rip: “[W]hen loud surges lash the sounding shore, / The hoarse, rough verse should like the torrent roar.” No one has to lash writers, however, before they’ll use an echoic effect. Like readers, writers love the sounds of words—sometimes a little too much. A linguistic element as basic as onomatopoeia is naturally seductive. How basic is it? Some linguists suggest that speech began as imitative sounds (iconic) as opposed to utterances merely symbolizing the things described. Though somewhat creaky now, this so-called bow-wow theory is reflected in the imitative choo-choos and quack-quacks of toddlers (and their parents).

  People acquire hundreds more echoic words as they zip, glug, and spule their way through adolescence and beyond. Each linguistic culture comes up with its own mimicry: Germans hear bimbam when bells ring. To the French, le pooch barks le ouâ-ouâ.

  Perhaps owing to its very simplicity, echoic language gets heavy-handed when writers use it in obvious ways, especially in poetry. Certain clichéd sounds attach to certain subjects, and must be shaken loose. For example, it would seem that the sound of bells can be described only in so many ways, especially after Poe took it to the limit in “The Bells” with such famous lines as: “To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells / From the bells, bells, bells, bells.” After this, can anyone wring fresh onomatopoeia out of bells? Good writers still find ways, as does Gabriel Gudding in “Foundry” (American Poetry Review). In this evocative poem, a fallen brass bell suffers wounds and humiliations as it struggles along a road seeking relief, “its swollen clacker . . . donking against fire hydrants and curb.” A ding may be one thing, but a donk is clearly another when you’re a down-and-out bell.

  * * *

  ONOMATOPOEIA FOR THE SEASON

  Mud-luscious. Puddle-wonderful. Can you feel, in these phrases from e.e. cummings’s poem “In Just-spring,” that squooshy, soggy time of year?

  Spring may be the ultimate prompt for sound symbolism, particularly onomatopoeia. Words gush forth to mimic the season’s chirps and gurgles, or to whisper their qualities:

  Thunder, boom, rumble, flash, crash . . . pitter-patter, plash, plink, plunk, splish, splash, dribble, drip . . . ooze, squish, babble, bubble, burble . . .croak, click, cluck, cheep, tweet, twitter, coo, chirrup, drone, bleat, croon . . . whump, flap, whish, whistle . . . crack, pop, vroom, slurp, sizzle.

  But these are merely the standard-issue echoes of spring delights. Your job is to go out, put your ear to the world, and gather fresh variations on the theme.

  * * *

  BASHES, FLASHES, SNIVELS AND SNORTS

  Here’s another twist on sound symbolism and writing: Linguists have observed that words containing similar sounds often express similar meanings. Experts find it easier to describe the phenomenon— commonly called “phonesthesia”—than to figure out its origins. But wherever it came from, there it is, for writers to use.

  Phonesthemic words contain sounds we somehow associate with qualities of subjects, rather than the sounds they make. Think of slime, slurry, sludge, and sleaze, for example, all suggestive of ickiness. Other phonesthemic groups include those nasty sn-words (sneer, snarl, snide, snitch), the forceful -sh gang (bash, dash, rush, crush), the shining gl’s (gleaming, glittery), and wee -ee’s (eensy, teensy).

  Why do these groups exist? Did facial expressions give rise to the sounds?

  Linguists regard such simplistic answers as bogus, but there’s nothing phony about phonesthesia itself. Many hundreds of words, from profanities to endearments, fall into such groups. Phonesthemic words can lend feeling and texture to a line of poetry, a character’s name, a scene, an editorial, or even an ad. Consider these sh- words describing the debris of a Philadelphia wharf, circa 1765:

  [U]nderfoot lies . . . shreds of spices . . . , splashes of Geneva gin, . . . oranges and shaddocks fallen and squash’d. (—Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon)

  If there are ways to animate debris, this is one of them—just as phonesthesia’s cousin, onomatopoeia, can make the jungle cry from the pages of Into the Heart of Borneo, by droll amateur ornithologist Redmond O’Hanlon:

  I awoke at dawn, to the didididididi call of the Grey drongo . . . ; the chatterings and muttering and babbling of unseen Babblers . . . ; the flutings and whistlings and cat-calls of hidden pittas or bulbuls or cuckoo-shrikes . . . ; and the distant hoot of a gibbon.

  Whether you awake tomorrow to the creee of the seaside or the bling-bling of the mean streets, listen to the sounds of life, the telling ones, and capture them for their re-creation in words—not only to reproduce what was heard, but to hint at what was felt.

  TWELVE

  COINING THE BONNE LOCUTION

  Today’s big American dictionaries contain about four hundred thousand “formations,” or words and word combinations; The Oxford English Dictionary checks in at almost seven hundred thousand. That’s a lotta words, especially when you consider that Shakespeare’s entire body of work boasts a vocabulary of only twenty thousand. How many more words do we need for our own oeuvres? Shouldn’t we exploit the inventory before rolling out new vocabulary? You’d think so. But it doesn’t work that way. Usage rides roughshod over the established lexicon. It constantly tweaks old words into essentially new meanings and coughs up new formations. Why? Because humans are irrepressible namers, and life provides an endless supply of things to name: new things, old things seen in new ways, new combinations of things, and imagined things.

  We burbling humans invent terms not only to identify things, but also to style our expression or be first or cleverest at naming something. Writers do it in the interest of precision, entertainment, recognition, and even duty: the world expects its authors to show some flash in the art of naming.

  Are you ready to deliver?

  WRITERS AND NEOLOGISMS

  A coinage, or “neologism,” is a new word or word combination that someone deliberately creates. Corporations crank them out regularly, as do fecund young minds on campuses and street corners; authors are responsible for untold numbers. Shakespeare himself is said to have invented some 1,500 of the words he used, among them grovel, hobnob, and the ever-popular puke.

  Every day, journalists tag new trends with coinages, like metro-sexual for straight men who enjoy facials and interior design. Copywriters neologize to herald the next big thing, tech writers to delineate the latest gizmo. ’Zine authors and bloggers neologize like word bunnies, or at least propagate new words from the subcultural breeding grounds.

  Storytellers, too—especially those inventing fantasy worlds—create new word formations, and even whole vocabularies, to serve their stories. J. K. Rowlings’s quaffle (a ball used in the game quidditch) isn’t any more likely to enter common parlance than Rudy Rucker’s suckapillar (genetically engineered cleaning bot). But often the neologisms break out, as did Robert Heinlein’s grok (deep understanding of someone) and George Orwell’s newspeak (propagandistic Big Brother language). Rowlings’s muggle (a person with no magical powers) is likewise speeding its way into the dictionaries.

  At times, authors neologize to distinguish things so ordinary that they have gone unnamed. Apparently no one had an English word for “going about on foot” until 1791, when William Wordsworth coined the noun pedestrian. Did it help pedestrians get right of way? We don’t know; but the coinage is decidedly of the utilitarian type: logical, made to serve, often influenced by Latin or Greek. More often, when writers name the unnamed, there’s an element of play afoot. Oscar Wilde is said to have coined dude as a combination of duds and attitude.

  Too much play, of course, distracts authors from the triathlon of writing—getting it down, getting it right, and getting it published. But when play delights readers as well as author, everyone wins. We would like to think that Edgar Allan Poe rang up a rare moment of glee when he coined tintinnabulation (the sound of bells) in 1831; readers certainly have loved it. John Irving pro
bably had fun coining undertoad (fear of tragedy) in The World According to Garp (1976), even if it played into the tale’s dark motif; the word (originally the phrase Under Toad) became a favorite of the book’s audience.

  If you write cultural or social commentary, you have the right—nay, the obligation—to mint terms for movements, trends, and groups. In 2001, writer David Brooks coined bobos (from bourgeois and bohemians) to describe former social rebels who have become well-heeled and self-indulgent. Some such coinages stick, and some even attach to their creators in perpetuity, as has pseudo-event to Daniel J. Boorstin, the late historian and social observer.

  * * *

  WRITERLY MATTERS NEEDING NAMES

  Rockumentary. Digerati. Bling. American subcultures pour out coinages like slot machines gone berserk, and the literary subculture contributes its share. Yet for every slush pile, back story, and bodice ripper minted within the writer’s world, some other writerly subject—often dolorous—cries out for an established (and perhaps cathartic) name. Here are several such entities, awaiting coinages for you to create (as practice) and share with fellow wordaholics:

  • A terse rejection note

  • A great idea you forgot to write down

  • The joy and pain of seeing a friend’s work published before your own

  • An inept muse

  • The agent who won’t communicate, loses your manuscript, and bills you anyway

  • A draft of a poem that you loved yesterday, but hate today

  • The almost-right word

  • An activity performed as an excuse to avoid writing

  • A merciless editor

  • A news event that renders your completed manuscript out-of-date

  • A passage you know you should cut from a piece of writing, but can’t

  • The act of turning your book face-out on bookstore shelves

  * * *

  COINING FOR THE HAPPY CLICK

  Generally speaking, it is not glory that drives one to neologize. Rather, one does so mainly for the sake of felicity—that happy click! when language perfectly fits idea. Such clicking coinages add joy to the works of Lewis Carroll, Dr. Seuss, James Joyce, and other zealous neologizers. Good coinages make reading a skosh more fun—whether they occur in the literary heights, where Joyce Carol Oates coined pathography (a biography dwelling on negative aspects), or in the tabloid swamps, the spawning grounds for terms like sexaholic.

  After all, most coinages are no more than “nonce” terms, meant for a single occasion and perhaps for a couple of laughs. Only the most useful or popular are gathered into book and Internet collections, and fewer still make it into the dictionaries—thankfully, or we’d be driven mad by them; it’s bad enough when a writer goes coinage-crazy in a short piece, as unstoppable as a mad punster. As a rule, neologisms should be limited to those best serving the purpose of the work—and only the cleverest at that.

  If the purpose is to entertain, however, the model collection is comedian Richard Hall’s Sniglets series (1984–1989), which presents “words that should be in the dictionary but aren’t.” Snigleteers, who still abound, create cute-sounding words for the unnamed entities of everyday life; e.g., slurm for the ick on a soap dish, and bovilexia for the urge to moo at cows. Such arguably needed terms are also called “word fugitives,” a theme Barbara Wallraff has pursued in her Atlantic Monthly columns on language.

  While most coinages fall short of immortality, writers of all types have produced neologisms that are gifts to the language as well as to their readers—terms we truly needed, such as Joseph Heller’s catch-22 or sci-fi writer William Gibson’s cyberspace.

  And speaking of cyberspace, imagine how many coinages are emerging this minute from the multitude of fevered online chat-persons. A staggering thought, but one that suggests a testing arena for a writer’s neologizing skills.

  HOW TO NEOLOGIZE WITH THE BEST OF THEM

  To sharpen those word-making powers, you might try a few of these standard methods of forming neologisms. In all cases, the coinages should be quick-witted and clear; not labored, not arcane, and not timid.

  Combining. Combine existing words or word parts (prefixes, suffixes, etc.) to make a new compound or other formation. You might go for a funny incongruity or a play on existing words: granny-bashing, eco-thriller, hottitude. An Esquire movie critic coined the term insta-chum for a couple stranded in shark-infested waters. Try something with the suffix -ectomy, which denotes excision of whatever precedes it.

  Shortening. Clip away parts of existing words, as in ’do (hairdo), ’tude (attitude), or ’roid (steroid). The intelligence community’s clippage for spies is humint (human intelligence). Think of words containing more syllables than they need to deliver their meaning— then chop ’em down to create something catchy.

  Blending. Blend one or more words into a new one; or blend clipped words with existing ones. Also known as “portmanteaus,” blend words include spim (from spam and instant message, or IM), cremains, glamazon, and bridezilla. Lollapalooza is clipped to make guiltapalooza (excessive remorse), as used in a Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV script.

  Borrowing. Borrow or recast foreign words and word parts: überagent (a super agent, such as Michael Ovitz); fauxmage (fake cheese).The Spanish suffix -ero /-era, which indicates that someone is employed at something, is a good starter for you worderos and worderas.

  Epynomic naming. Turn well-known proper names (real or fictitious) into nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc.: mega-scrooge; Dorothy Parkering. When Anna Kournikova was the “it” girl of tennis, another player called the sport “over-Kournikova-ized.” What would your name suggest as part of a coinage?

  Creating. Make up an entirely new word, as Lewis Carroll did with chortle and burble for Through the Looking-Glass (1871).

  Carroll advised neologizers to “take care of the sounds, and the sense will take care of itself”—a thought worth considering as you test your word-coining talent here (see “Writerly Matters Needing Names” sidebar) or at some point in the triauthorlon that never ends.

  THIRTEEN

  WORDS WITH FOREIGN UMAMI

  The Japanese word umami (oo-MOM-ee) has all the qualities of a foreign term worth borrowing: It is rich in meanings, easy to read, and not bettered by an English equivalent. A Tokyo scientist coined it in 1907 to indicate a “fifth taste”—a deliciousness or savoriness that goes beyond the four basic tastes: salt, sour, sweet, and bitter. Never mind that the scientist found umami in monosodium glutamate, that head-rattling flavor enhancer. The word itself connotes something mystical, some quintessential quality, a perfection.

  Though not yet assimilated into American English, umami has reached Yankee shores in connection with food. A writer for Wine Spectator referred to a coconut lime soup as “a caldron of umami.” And a chef who liked the sound of the word proclaimed himself “The Swami of Umami” on a T-shirt.

  But now the word is ready for use in a literary or metaphorical sense, to evoke the quality of exquisiteness wherever it is found. Surely an adventurous writer like yourself can conjure a fresh application; or perhaps from your world travels, experience with a foreign language, or word collecting, you have some other cross-cultural gem ready to drop into in an English sentence. We are talking about an infrequent act here—a dash that spices the whole. But thinking about even a single use of a non-English term brings up three options:

  • To use the term unencumbered by a translation, assuming your core audience knows it, can dope it out from context, or will at least appreciate the look and sound of it.

  • To use the term and translate it for the reader, as best you can and in as few words as possible.

  • To not use it in the first place, heeding Rule 20 of Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style—namely:

  Avoid foreign languages. . . . Some writers . . . from sheer exuberance or a desire to show off, sprinkle their work liberally with foreign expressions, with no regard for the reader’s comfort. It is a bad habit. Writ
e in English.

  A PENCHANT FOR “NATIVE” SPEECH

  Such admonitions to stick to one’s own words seem a day late when it comes to American English—roughly three-quarters of which consists of “loanwords,” or terms that were borrowed from some 120 non-English languages and naturalized over the centuries. (A word that becomes naturalized by frequent use loses its italics; often it also takes on local spelling and other characteristics— for example, “vamoose,” which comes from the Spanish vamos, meaning “let’s go.”)

  What exactly does it mean to “write in English”? Does it mean using only those terms granted citizenship by dictionaries or other authorities? Such has not been the English or American way. For the umami of the Anglo-American lexical broth, we can thank all those language users smuggling foreign terms into the vernacular over the centuries.