I've always wanted a rubber stamp that said "REQUEST DENIED", although I don't know if I'd ever be able to bring myself to use it. (That said, I once had made, and gave to someone as a gift, a rubber stamp that was a full eleven inches wide and four inches tall, which said PISS OFF! in all caps. That was fun to pick up at the office-supply store.)

But if I did have a "REQUEST DENIED" stamp, I'd use it for this semi-serious request that was written about here, at the Volokh Conspiracy:

Instead of creating a new word to represent someone who is receiving guidance under a mentor as a 'mentee', couldn't someone (not certain of who is responsible for adding/changing definitions to the official dictionaries) simply add an additional definition to the word protege to allow for further meaning?

Okay. Let's unpack this a bit:

• There is no one person who is responsible for "adding/changing definitions to the official dictionaries" -- at least, not for English, as English has no "official dictionaries." Perhaps you're thinking of French?


• Dictionaries (as is, thankfully, pointed out in the original post) don't add new definitions "to allow for further meaning". "Further meanings: allowed" is the DEFAULT SETTING. You want to use protege to mean mentee? Go ahead, knock yourself out -- just be prepared to be misunderstood.
  
  (Me, I occasionally use henimus to mean "(not a) genius", based on a MISUNDERSTANDING of this episode ["Girlfriend 2000"] from the old Chris Elliott show "Get a Life", which I think four people watched ... although the toxic-waste-doping spelling bee episode, "Chris's Brain", with its prize of a jewel-encrusted dictionary, is a Dictionary Evangelist favorite. But I don't expect to be understood when I use henimus, because it's about as obscure as you can get.)


• If you don't like mentee, there's no reason you have to use it: say "the person I mentor," or some other work-around. Just because a word exists doesn't imply that its use is obligatory.

Also worth rebutting (which Volokh does quite well, but I'll throw in a couple pennies as well): the idea that if the word mentee exists, that this implies the existence of the verb to ment. I don't know where this notion came from, but English morphology is a bit more fluid than this. You can certainly go from mentor to mentee without having to postulate some missing-link verb *ment. Although, frankly, I'm considering using ment now (strictly jocularly, and on my own recognizance) just to piss those anti-mentee people off.

To sum up: yes, mentee is a slightly awkward word. Give it time to grow up a bit, or use a work-around of some sort ... although if you decide to repurpose another word, be prepared for some "what?" reactions. But, please, don't waste your time or anyone else's trying to get a dictionary to record a change that hasn't yet happened in the language. We have enough to do keeping up with the changes that have!

Thanks to Kat for the link!

Labels: dictionary_lobbying, language_change, not-a-word

As I know all of you know, an eponym is a word that comes from somebody's name. Braille from Louis Braille, silhouette from Étienne de Silhouette, etc., so on and so forth.

Leah sent me a link some time ago to a new eponym from Stephanie Pearl-McPhee (also known as The Yarn Harlot): kinnearing, after the actor Greg Kinnear, whom she ran into at the airport. Kinnearing is taking surreptitious pictures of someone (possibly someone famous) without being obvious about it, or, in fact, without even looking through the camera's viewfinder. But you should really go read her post about it.

I realized I often kinnear (with my cameraphone) people on the subway or in the airport who are reading books by people I have met, which happens more than you might think. Then I send the pictures to the author, you know, just in case they have some paranoid idea that no one is actually reading their books. For instance, this woman is reading Wake Up, Sir! by Jonathan Ames:



And this person is reading The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson (although I can't remember if I sent him this photo or not, I guess I'll just send him the link to this post):



I know, I know, it's a weird practice, but as a dictionary editor the chances are slim (or, more likely, none) that I will ever see someone randomly using a book I worked on in the subway ... if you ever see that happen, kinnear away!

Labels: neologism

Check out the article here.

They list examples of 'unwords' such as ex-door neighbor "someone who used to be your neighbor but moved away" and dark-thirty "a half-hour after sunset."

Of course, as with most newspaper articles about neologisms, they are starting from the idea is that these neologisms aren't "real" words. Balderdash! They're words just as soon as people start using them as words (instead of as quasi-jokes).

Google shows me at least a few natural uses of ex-door neighbor (that is, uses that aren't just the word and its definition) and my family has been using a variant of dark-thirty for years: we use oh-dark-thirty, which is any ungodly hour of the morning, e.g., "My flight's at six, so I'll be leaving for the airport at oh-dark-thirty." (It seems to be a USMC term, which makes sense as my grandfather was a Marine ... albeit an unconventional one.)

Go ahead and submit your neologisms to them (the email address to do so is in the article) ... here's hoping they get some good examples and can help spread them. The only bad neologism is the unexamined neologism, in my (admittedly biased) opinion.

Of course, I'm reserving judgment on their term baby bear, "when something is just right," as in "You hungry, man? Nah, I'm baby bear." That one seems just a bit too twee for the example context given ... although I'm enjoying thinking of, say, the guys on Entourage trying to use it.

Thanks very much to Amy for the link!

Labels: neologism

Ben Zimmer is much more caught up in his reading than I am, so he spotted first (in NZ Words) this information about the artist John Reynolds and his piece of lexical art, Cloud:



The piece, which was installed at the 2006 Biennale of Sydney, is made of about 7000 mini-canvases, each bearing a word of New Zealand English.

More information about the work is here, but, warning: Flash-heavy site.

If you are interested in NZ English, you probably want your own subscription to NZ Words, the publication of the NZ Dictionary Centre. You can read back issues in PDF or subscribe here.

Labels: dictionary_art, New_Zealand

I know it's not really fair to make fun of poor English translations on products not intended for the English-speaking market (especially when it's not like I could write suitable product descriptions in Korean myself, for instance), but when it's a dictionary being offered, well, it's just too funny for me to resist:

The electronic dictionary of Atree UM10 offers to more than gatherings the eye, comprising a posting 480 X 272 which makes well to present its English/Korean glory entirely as well as word 100.000 of dictionary of the documents of Office of reading and photographs to show. The force of UM10 is in the playback of media while it of the formats supports MPEG 4, WMV, MP3, WMA, and OGG file. The inclusion of a tuner of DMB makes the business whole all softer than you become to look at Numerical emissions of TV where than you go. There are no word on evaluating or availability, but the UM10 comes in savours 2GB and 4GB. Not to corrode about missing space since you can always throw a chart of the microSD 2GB in ravelled material.

I think I would prefer the 4GB savour, myself. And you can watch (Korean) TV on it! What more could you want in a dictionary?

More (and more comprehensible) information is here. Sadly, it doesn't look as if you'll be able to buy this stateside (except that *I* live near a Korean business district in Chicago, so I will be on the lookout ...)

Thanks to Robert Amsler for the link!

Labels: electronic_dictionaries, Engrish

I'm late posting this (it's been out for WEEKS), but hey, I was out of the country, first literally, and then metaphorically (while I tried to catch up).

But: remember the New Word Open Mic? A podcast is now available!

You can find it here, at Charles Hodgson's Podictionary site, or here, at KPBS, from A Way With Words. (Please go here to help in the quest to find that show a new home ...)

I have to admit: I haven't listened to it yet, because I am not especially fond of listening to myself (I already know what I said! Also: do I really sound like that? I'm a little more ... basso profundo ... in my head). But generally, the response has been positive. So go check it out!

Labels: neologism, podcasts