A perfect example
I often talk about how some words seem to hover in the ether (or aether, if you prefer) and will themselves into being, often by jumping into multiple brains near-simultaneously. And now I have a great example of this phenomenon, which I can share with you.
I just (and by 'just', I mean 'in the past several weeks') got a lovely email from Anthony Durity, in response to my TED talk, and letting me know a word he invented, ygology. Ygology, is, of course, the study of palindromes.
Now, I thought, that's a cool word. Let's Google it. So I did, and found some competing coinage claims.
Which, frankly, only makes sense. Knowing what a palindrome is, and knowing the suffix -ology, ygology was inevitable. It had to be born; English almost demanded it.
It's probably possible (with some taking of depositions) to determine exactly who first used ygology, and when, and in response to what ... but why bother? We have the word, which is the important thing, after all. I think coining claims should be like Nobels; nobody minds if two or three people win one together.
The illustration above is an ambigram, a kind of visual palindrome, done by John Langdon. Check out his website!
This entry was posted by Erin, on
Tuesday, October 16, 2007.
You can leave your response.
10:35 PM
Those who shudder at the thought of ygology suffer from aibohphobia, of course.
4:52 PM
Oh, I love making ambigrams. The best one I ever made was for my little brother's name, Dmitri. Actually, I made three versions. They're fun.
12:57 PM
Unfortunately it translates awfully, which is not usually the case of words in -ology.
10:19 AM
Way cool, you learn something new everyday!
Linda
10:31 AM
how would you even pronounce that? i-gology? or would it have to be orally palindromic as well, such as ee-jology?
...if the word palindrome doesn't find the necessity to be palindromic, why should the study of such words be? Oh sure it's fun, but impractical. Shall we rename palindromes to semordromes? or spalinilaps? with the singulars being emordrome and palinilap? Or maybe the studiers of them shall be stsigologists?
11:52 AM
Someone who studies palindromes would surely be a 'tsygologyst'... giving 'tsygology' as the study of palindromes. Not itself a palindrome, but then as Sue points out, neither is 'palindrome'.
2:36 AM
semodromes could work. Like "places where meanings fight".
And it doesn't translate awfully, there's "aigología" in spanish and italian.
9:12 PM
Hey, I was wondering...why is "eranacious" your favorite word?
9:12 AM
Sarah, it's 'erinaceous', which might make why it's my favorite word more apparent. I like it because it's silly, and because it has the string E-R-I-N in it.
Blame a childhood of never being able to get personalized pencils or license plates. When I was young "ERIN" was an unusual name!