My Word's Worth: a weekly column by Marylaine Block

vol. 1, #12, October, 1995

Our language is wonderfully flexible, and full of far more words than most of us will ever use, but still it doesn't quite seem to keep up with the world. When our lives change, the language needs to change along with us. It won't surprise you to learn that I have a few modest suggestions for the good dictionary-makers. Like:

DOINK-DOINK-DOINKER:

These are the computer wizards, helping out us technological nincompoops. We ask them how to do something, and they say, "Oh, that's easy, you just [doink doink doink]" . They have hit a few buttons, accomplished their magic, and we have not a clue what buttons they hit, in what order they hit them, why they hit them, and what would happen if we, God forbid, hit the wrong buttons. (We suspect it would be the end of the world as we know it.)

These guys (and, yeah, they are mostly guys) are wonderful fixers and terrible teachers. Our world is divided between people who use programs, and people who actually know what the hell they're doing. So we need teachers and manual-writers who are born techno-incompetents but who have been taught how to make those programs and systems work. You may have to work hard at getting me to understand a program, but once I do, I am a terrific explainer--I write the kind of directions that even I could understand.

DOT.COM (or in your case, DOT.CO.):

As in, all the stuff we're used to getting for free on the internet might not be free any more if the dot.coms take over the internet. (Forgive me if I'm nervous about this--the most recent wave of media mergers leaves us with a vision of Rupert Murdoch controlling the entire world.) When I see dot.coms that have figured out excellent strategies for posting advertising on their sites, like Yahoo's, it makes me very grateful; as long as they can make their money off of advertisers, information brokers like me can continue to get our information for free on those sites. In the meantime, though, thank God for the DOT.EDUs (DOT.ACs) and DOT.ORGs and DOT.NETs.

NOBIT:

An elegiac puff piece about somebody who hasn't actually got around to dying yet--see anything written in the American press about Bill Gates or Gen. Colin Powell for examples of this art form. This is the sort of appreciation that most of us get after we're dead and not really in a position to fully appreciate it. But a select few mortals are so altogether splendid that they get a free pass from reporters. (The less that reporters understand the work these heroes have done, the higher the accolades.)

I will grant a certain illegitimacy to the derivation of this word. My son and I were playing Upwords (a Scrabble-like word game), and if he could con me into accepting the word, he would have scored major points. In my role as guardian of the sanctity of the English language (read: loser), I denied its existence. But he was right. We need this word.

(I will also admit that I do the same sort of thing. Faced with a leftover unplaceable E, I tried to talk him into letting me place it in front of MEWL, on the theory that if cats were on the internet, they would be sending E-MEWL. Necessity is not the mother of invention. Desperation is.)

AUTOHAGIOGRAPHY:

This is what you get when the NOBIT is written by its subject, or by his ghostwriter. Michael Kinsley came up with this word; if I recall correctly, it was in reference to Lee Iacocca's autobiography, which of course makes it a splendid pun as well.

DECIBELLICOSITY.

This is Ursula LeGuin's wonderful word, which she used to describe the soundtracks for Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Star Wars. However, it can just as easily be used to describe the assault by boombox, often wielded by muscular young men with an "I-just-dare-you-to-say-something" attitude.

I'm sure that some of the words that computer people have come up with will make it into Webster's too. They certainly deserve to; it turns out that the Dilberts of this world have an unexpectedly poetic spirit that shows itself in their word creation. I'm very partial to

DEAD-TREE-EDITION:

a wonderful retrofit word for what we used to call newspapers back when that was the only way we could get our news. And as one who has spent a lot of time waiting for web files to transfer,

and also

IMHO, IMNSHO, and IMNERHO:

In my humble opinion, not so humble opinion, and not even remotely humble opinion. Despite being descended from men who believed themselves to be god, I really don't offer my thoughts as the wisdom of the ages; I'm an IMHO. The ideas to which I am seriously committed are ideas that work for me, and anyone else is welcome to consider them; other ideas are ideas that I am trying on for size. In either case, I'm always open to argument; feel free to try to convince me I'm wrong.

These are just a few suggestions for making our language resemble our world a bit more. The nice thing about English is how adaptable it is. You can make up a word on the spot, or change words from nouns to verbs or adjectives, and still be instantly understood, like when I was explaining what I was doing when I was htmling--whenever you "a", you then have to "un-a".

Our mother tongue nurtures a lot of cuckoo's babies. She doesn't much care where the words come from; she'll sit on them, hatch them, feed them, kick them out of the nest, and give them a chance to fly. And if they do, the good grey folk who make our dictionaries will add them to their list.

NOTE: My thinking is always a work in progress. You could mentally insert all my columns in between these two sentences: "This is something I've been thinking about," and "Does this make any sense to you?" I welcome your thoughts. Please send your comments about these columns to: marylaine at netexpress.net. Since I've written a lot of these, some of them many years ago, help me out by telling me which column you're referring to.

I'll write columns here whenever I really want to share an idea with you and can find time to write them . If you want to be notified when a new one is up, send me an e-mail and include "My Word's Worth" in the subject line.