. . . And Lingo Was Their Game-O
To the Verbal Go the Spoils at Neologism Boot Camp

By J.J. McCoy
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 13, 2003; Page C10

In a spartanly furnished classroom three stories below the National Mall, conspirators are hard at work.

They're conjuring up words. They'd like nothing better than to invent them, then sit back and listen to the rest of us use them. They want this so much that each has given up five hours of a Saturday and paid upward of $120 to hear Erin McKean, the 31-year-old senior editor for Oxford University Press's American English dictionaries, talk about the life and death of language. She discusses the birth of "bling-bling," "soccer moms" and "reality TV," just a few of the phrases that have slipped into American vernacular in recent years.

She talks about staying power and burnout -- take "cyberspace," for example, a word coined by author William Gibson in 1984 and now securely entrenched, compared with "information superhighway," which also has its place in the dictionary but seems to be slipping into obsolescence.

"The dictionary is not a dictator, it's a mirror of what people do," she tells the 27 academics, bureaucrats, lawyers, retirees and writers who've signed on as cadets in this Smithsonian-sponsored "Word-Lover's Boot Camp." The best dictionary, McKean continues, is merely a record of the written expressions of a culture and language. Hence Oxford's listing of "hopefully," Homer Simpson's "D'oh!" and the use of "fellowship" as a verb (a usage dating from at least 1374, more than 600 years before cinema-goers fellowshipped in watching "The Lord of the Rings").

And at risk of scrambling the sensibilities of Scrabble devotees, McKean gets even more subversive: "You don't have to be in the dictionary to be a word [any more than] you don't have to be a purebred to be a dog." It's a particularly antithetical notion coming from one whose employer ambitiously aspires to include every English word in general usage since 1700 (plus any leftovers among the complete works of Shakespeare, Milton and the King James Bible).

The 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary is considered the most comprehensive reference for the English language. The company's two-volume Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (SOED), released last fall, saw fit to include 3,500 new words by using its "5 by 5 by 5" rule: five examples in five printed sources over five years.

By McKean's standards, the cadets' new constructions -- including "catagram" (a word without an anagram) and "homofication" (adoption of a gay lifestyle by someone who has recently come out of the closet) -- share the legitimacy of, say, an old word that seems to have renewed relevance, such as "woofits" (a gloomy mood, from the World War I era). Not yet in the dictionary but on Oxford's shortlist is "9/11," not soon to be forgotten, and "reality TV," which might best be.

Sometimes meaning is decided before orthography; we're still figuring out whether the word for online correspondence should be rendered as "E-mail," "e-mail" or "email."

At ages 76 and 73, respectively, Roy and Carol Thomas of Montgomery County share a mutual interest in language and opsimathy (from 1656, learning acquired late in life). A retired high school librarian who teaches English as a second language at Montgomery College, Carol is driven to bruxism (grinding of teeth) at the thought of the word "tasked," cited by Oxford back in 1828.

Conversely, allocthonous (non-native) poet and author Sheree Fitch, 46, transplanted to the District from Ottawa while her husband finishes a two-year work assignment, simply "loves words, the taste of them, the lip-slipperiness of them," and prefers poetic license to precision.

Philosophical differences are bound to arise where authoritarianism abuts artistry.

The dynamics in the room aren't anywhere near the scale of the war over words in, say, Bhutan, where the Dzongkha Development Commission of the Royal Government is finalizing a new grammar, and devising an entire new dictionary, in hopes of defending the Himalayan country's traditional language from outside influences. Tej K. Bhatia, a professor of languages and linguistics at Syracuse University, explains that the mountain folk are in for an uphill battle: Successes among state-mandated languages have been spotty.

As McKean has been impressing upon her class, Bhatia explains, "the most important thing is that the vocabulary you create must be accepted by its users. There are piles of created dictionaries that just sit on closet shelves. The users are going to select a word that has utility, that will give them some mileage."

That's the real key to a language's survival, finding a word with juice. When it comes to new words, as McKean notes, "there are more and more words all the time. . . . We're not slowing down at all, which I think is a great thing."

John Metcalfe came out on top at the boot camp. His "Gallogophasia" (the gratuitous insertion of French words into general conversation) was the favorite among his classmates and earned the 23-year-old editorial intern a copy of the SOED.

Gallogophasia may have won the prize, but the word of the day may actually have been "sinefine" -- defined by Polish immigrant-cum-West Virginia artist and boot-camp cadet Paul Wyszkoski as "an unending task," like language itself. For McKean and her fellow logophiles, that's -- to use English's most widely understood word -- okay.