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U-M HERITAGE »
Panty raid, 1952
The first warm night of 1952. Music blares. Students' thoughts turn to love and fighting. Time to launch a national craze: the panty raid.
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- U-M Heritage: How to date women, circa 1943
- University of Michigan 2008 Graduation (Story and Video)
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It may be in your head, but it's not your imagination. Cancer patients may find that chemotherapy causes cognitive problems.
Talking about science
Go with the flow
Physics can clarify the energy crisis by getting back to basics.
TALKING ABOUT WORDS »
My Word ®
Have you made up any words lately? There's no shortage of people who claim they have.
TALKING ABOUT MOVIES »
What is Bollywood?
Some of the world's most spectacular movies are being made in Bollywood. But fewer really know what really sets these films apart.
My Word ®
July 15, 2008
"Cakery?" wrote a reader responding to a recent column in which a baker took credit for a new word. "How could she imagine that she had made it up? There are cakeries all over the Internet."
We'd all like to brand new words.
Sometimes word-coiners write to dictionary-makers, put forth their claim, and express willingness to allow their word (and themselves) to be included in the next edition. One publisher's site even invites readers to submit words and definitions on-line and "get credit."
We want to be original. We want the credit for originality. Alas, like cakery, there's often someone who got there first.
In a recent history of the internet published in Vanity Fair, the media mogul Barry Diller explains how he developed on-line shopping: "I started using a PC earlier than most, and it led me to discover something that I referred to as interactivity, a word that I obviously made up."
Obviously is a nice touch, isn't it? Even if Diller's claim were true, there's nothing on the face of his claim that is obvious.
And of course it isn't true. The first instance so far unearthed of interactivity involving the collaboration of user and machine comes from 1970 (in a journal called Computers and the Humanities), and it subsequently appears in Scientific American (among other places)—all of these long before the PC and Diller's idea for on-line shopping.
People do make up words and get credit for them. A famous one is serendipity, created by the writer Horace Walpole in 1754, for making unanticipated discoveries while searching for something else. (Serendip was a name for what is now Sri Lanka, and Walpole described three princes there who were in the habit of stumbling upon unexpected good things.) In 1994, Bryn Mawr established an interactive website to foster serendipity in science; it's supported by NSF and the Howard Hughes Medical Insitute. Go there: you might stumble on something yourself.
In 1961, the art critic Harold Rosenberg published "The Tradition of the New," and in it he argued that Americans are in love with innovation and novelty. The Chinese might admire the gradual refinement over centuries of ink drawings of emergent bamboo, but we wanted things to be just plain different. Pop art (for instance) was good because it was new, and new is better than old.
As with our art, so with our words. We want new ones, and we want to make them our own.
is Professor Emeritus of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan. His latest publication (co-edited with Colette Moore and Marilyn Miller) is an edition of a chronicle of daily life in London written by a merchant in the middle of the sixteenth century. This electronic book incorporates images of the manuscript, a transcript of the writing it contains, and a modernization of the text for easy reading. Thanks to the University of Michigan Library and the University Press, the work is freely available to all: http://www.hti.umich.edu/m/machyn