I’ve been reading Hendrik Hertzberg’s “Politics: Observations and Arguments” (“Powells”:http://www.powells.com/partner/29956/s?kw=Hendrik%20Hertzberg%20Politics , “Amazon”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?link_code=ur2&tag=henryfarrell-20&camp=1789&creative=9325&path=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2Fgp%2Fproduct%2F0143035533%2Fqid%3D1136742549%2Fsr%3D8-3%2Fref%3Dpd_bbs_3%3Fn%3D507846%2526s%3Dbooks%2526v%3Dglance ) over the last couple of days, and I’m greatly taken by it – witty and intelligent political journalism. I was particularly taken with his coined term, the “expectorate,” which refers to those “journalists, consultants and spin doctors,” (and today, one would presume, bloggers) who manipulate or present expectations about who is winning or losing in American politics. It deserves to be more widely known. Are there other coinages out there deserve wider circulation? Off the top of my head, I can think of Kim Stanley Robinson’s term ‘mallsprawl’ – much catchier and more evocative than the anodyne and uninformative “Edge City”, but “scarcely known”:http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22mallsprawl%22&btnG=Google+Search to the wider public. Philip K. Dick’s ‘kipple,’ junk that seems to reproduce itself, has done somewhat better (it has a “Wikipedia entry”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kipple), but not as well . Any others?
{ 24 comments }
sennoma 01.08.06 at 3:40 pm
“Mathom”, Tolkein’s word for anything for which one has no immediate use, but which one is unwilling to throw away. It’s rather like “white elephant” but without the unpleasant overtone. It’s been picked up here and there, and google finds about 125,000 references, but it’s not exactly in common usage as far as I can tell.
Keith 01.08.06 at 4:46 pm
Robert Heinlein gave us Grok, to know something intuitively, which had cache in the 60s but seems to have fallen out of use (possibly due to the hippie stench clinging to it) but I’ve always felt that it touched on something important that our language had overlooked for quite some time and deserves to come back into popular parlance.
Phil Dick had some whoppers. Besides Kipple, he also popularized the concept of an Android as something biological, similar to a robot but very human. VALIS (Vast Active Living Intelligence System) is a term he coined that has wide potential as it covers a complex, self-aware biological system, artificial intelligence and theological conundrum.
I stumbled on a portmanteau some years ago: philosophistry. Sophistry masquerading as Deep and Important Philosophy. Think sophomore college students who have just discovered Nietzsche and think they are hot shit or the Randian at your local café.
Bob 01.08.06 at 5:06 pm
Kieth: how is philosophistry different from sophistry?
Ray 01.08.06 at 5:43 pm
I thought ‘to grok’ meant to grasp the essentials of something, to understand the whole from a few parts?
Antti Nannimus 01.08.06 at 7:24 pm
Hi,
Many more coined terms be found at and at .
Have a nice day,
Antti
Antti Nannimus 01.08.06 at 7:27 pm
Sorry, I don’t know how to format these links
Jargon Scout
http://www.tbtf.com/jargon-scout.html
World Wide Words
http://www.worldwidewords.org/index.htm
Antti
Bill Gardner 01.08.06 at 9:05 pm
Henry,
I move that CT does a seminar on KSR. Do I a hear a second?
Scott Spiegelberg 01.08.06 at 10:17 pm
I’ll second that. I got to meet him last year at a reading. He has very interesting ideas about science fiction that would garner good conversations. And his current works on climate change are certainly topical.
P O'Neill 01.08.06 at 10:32 pm
Without any expressed or implied endorsement of the originators, I think that Sinn Fein’s term ‘securocrats‘ really deserves wider circulation, as it perfectly captures the mentality of King George’s besuited snoopers.
JR 01.08.06 at 11:17 pm
It is a shame that Norman Mailer’s wonderful coinage, “factoid,” has been debased from Mailer’s intended meaning – a falsehood planted in the press and generally accepted as fact.
dale 01.09.06 at 2:54 am
comment 2: keith –
the way I remember it ‘grok’ meant to mull over something, or brood on it deeply, in an unstructured fashion, and without expectation or preconception. or something.
in my memory of Stranger in a Strange Land, VMS is always claiming he has to ‘grok’ (on) something before venturing a judgement. or was i that far off?
(relurks)
Alex Gregory 01.09.06 at 3:26 am
I thought it was more like “to understand completely”, in quite a strong sense. Wikipedia confirms with this quote from SIASL:
“Grok means to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of the observed—to merge, blend, intermarry, lose identity in group experience. It means almost everything that we mean by religion, philosophy, and science—and it means as little to us (because we are from Earth) as color means to a blind man”
Alex
Doug 01.09.06 at 3:57 am
Edge city, as I remember it from the book of the same name, had a useful and specific definition. It sprang from the observation that many of the clusters in American cities supported as many jobs as the traditional downtown. By any reasonable definition, they had become cities in their own right and should be recognized as such. Before Garreau’s book, there was a tendency to dismiss such clusters, or to think of them as aberrations or mere extensions of historic downtowns. If the meaning of edge city has wandered since then, that’s too bad, because it was a useful encapsulation of an important development.
Doug 01.09.06 at 4:01 am
Similarly, ‘rutz’ ought to pass into the language, although it still seems to be waiting for its Garreau. Rutz, as in rural-to-urban transition zone. Outer exurbia, where suburban and rural values are coming into conflict, where, for instance, water mains meet septic tanks. It’s been one of the most important corners of America since at least the mid-90s, but I don’t think there’s a good mainstream book on it yet. Rutz.
Arthur Davidson Ficke 01.09.06 at 9:07 am
Ones that I’ve always liked:
1. blivet: A fat person that you can’t get around for some reason (like they’re blocking the aisle at the market, or ordering too much food at the counter, etc.)
2. framis: A generic term for a small contraption that serves some clever purpose
Steve 01.09.06 at 10:14 am
My favorite (from the Simpsons):
Cheese-eating-surrender-monkies = the French
Steve
Henry 01.09.06 at 12:49 pm
Bill – it sounds like fun although I’ve no personal contact with the man. But maybe when the third book in his current series comes out …
Bill Gardner 01.09.06 at 1:29 pm
Re: KSR — just a thought. I like the current series, although not quite as much as Red Mars or Green Mars. He’s exceptional, however, at capturing what it’s like to be a scientist in a policy-relevant discipline. The scene where Frank chairs the study section meeting is amazing.
Kenny Easwaran 01.09.06 at 1:49 pm
Speaking of seminars, I notice that there’s no sidebar link to the Susanna Clarke seminar – is that going to change?
Bill McNeill 01.09.06 at 1:51 pm
Response to kieth #2…Grok may have fallen out of use after the 60s (between the time of the original Heinlein novel and the 80s, almost all the O.E.D. citations come from Tom Wolfe), but it came back with a vengence among computer geeks who now commonly use it to mean understand profoundly. In fact, to me the word means “understand a concept in computer science profoundly” with an application to non-computer subjects as a kind of metaphoric extension.
lemuel pitkin 01.09.06 at 5:33 pm
Edge City is originally from the semi-cult movie Repo Man — it’s the name of the underpopulated, vaguely dystopian Los Angeles where the movie is set.
I’m fascinated by the notion that kipple “has done somewhat better, but not as well.” Scans nicely, but what does it mean?
lemuel pitkin 01.09.06 at 7:36 pm
Oh, and:
“Chinese field trip”: A group of people walking slowly and taking up the whole sidewalk, making it impossible to get around them. Courtesy of the lads at New York Press; it’s not quite as racist as it sounds since the etymology is via “Chinese fire drill”.
Keith 01.09.06 at 7:42 pm
Those wacky comp sci folk. They made Spam not just a meat-like substance but an evil unto itself and now have revived Grok. Bless ’em.
Answer to a question upthread: The difference between regular old Sophistry and Philosophistrty is a difference of degrees. It’s used in regards to someone who is blissfully unaware or uncarring of their pretension. The sort of person who read the back cover of Beyond Good and Evil and offers lectures on the contents to philosophy grad Students.
Bill McNeill 01.09.06 at 8:12 pm
Wouldn’t philosophistry be the love of sophistry?
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