A neologism (pron.: /niːˈɒlədʒɪzəm/; from Greek νέο- (néo-), meaning "new", and λόγος (lógos), meaning "speech, utterance") is a newly coined term, word, or phrase, that may be in the process of entering common use, but has not yet been accepted into mainstream language.Neologisms are often directly attributable to a specific person, publication, period, or event. Νεολεξία (Greek: a "new word", or the act of creating a new word) is a synonym for it. The term neologism is first attested in English in 1772, borrowed from French néologisme (1734).
In psychiatry, the term neologism is used to describe the use of words that have meaning only to the person who uses them, independent of their common meaning. This tendency is considered normal in children, but in adults can be a symptom of psychopathy or a thought disorder (indicative of a psychotic mental illness, such asschizophrenia).People with autism also may create neologisms. Additionally, use of neologisms may be related to aphasia acquired after brain damage resulting from a strokeor head injury.
Truthiness is a quality characterizing a "truth" that a person claims to know intuitively "from the gut" or because it "feels right" without regard to evidence, logic, intellectualexamination, or facts.
American television comedian Stephen Colbert coined the word in this meaningas the subject of a segment called "The Wørd" during the pilot episode of his political satireprogram The Colbert Report on October 17, 2005. By using this as part of his routine, Colbert satirized the misuse of appeal to emotion and "gut feeling" as a rhetorical device in contemporaneous socio-political discourse. He particularly applied it to U.S. President George W. Bush's nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court and the decision to invade Iraq in 2003.Colbert later ascribed truthiness to other institutions and organizations, including Wikipedia.Colbert has sometimes used a Dog Latin version of the term, "Veritasiness". For example, in Colbert's "Operation Iraqi Stephen: Going Commando" the word "Veritasiness" can be seen on the banner above the eagle on the operation's seal.
Truthiness, although a "stunt word", was named Word of the Year for 2005 by the American Dialect Society and for 2006 by Merriam-Webster.Linguist and OED consultantBenjamin Zimmer pointed out that the word truthiness already had a history in literature and appears in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), as a derivation of truthy, andThe Century Dictionary, both of which indicate it as rare or dialectal, and to be defined more straightforwardly as "truthfulness, faithfulness".Responding to claims, Colbert explained the origin of his word as, "Truthiness is a word I pulled right out of my keister ...".
A retronym is a type of neologism that provides a new name for an object or concept to differentiate its original form or version from a more recent form or version.The original name is most often augmented with an adjective (rather than being completely displaced) to account for later developments of the object or concept itself.
Much retronymy is driven by advances in technology. Examples of retronyms are "acoustic guitar" (coined when electric guitars appeared), and analog watch to distinguish from a digital watch. Often, at first, the new version of an object is given a special name to distinguish it from the established version. If, however, the new version becomes the standard, it loses the part of its name that identifies it as new or different, and a retronym is coined for the original. The earliest razors with encased blades were called "safety razors" to distinguish them from what were then just called "razors." But the safety razor has since become the standard and the original razor is now called a "straight-edge," "open," or "cut-throat" razor.
Similarly, the first bicycles with two wheels of equal size were called "safety bicycles" because they were easier to handle than the then-dominant style that had one large wheel and one small wheel, which then became known as an "ordinary" bicycle. Now, most "bicycles" are expected to have two equally-sized wheels, and the other type has been renamed "penny-farthing" or "high-wheeler" bicycle. Prior to the introduction of pneumatic tires, riding over the large wheel of the "penny-farthing" gave a much smoother ride, which accounts for their popularity. The "penny-farthing" itself had displaced bicycles with more equal wheels. Almost at the same time the "penny-farthing" was introduced the older bicycles became known as "bone-shakers", possibly another retronym.
A bacronym or backronym is a phrase specially constructed so that an acronym fits an existing word. For example, NASA's "Combined Operational Load-Bearing External Resistance Treadmill (COLBERT)" was given that name in recognition of comedian Stephen Colbert's attempts to have a space module named for him. Backronyms may be invented with serious or humorous intent, or may be a type of false or folk etymology.
The word is a combination of backward and acronym, and has been defined as a "reverse acronym". Its earliest known citation in print is as "bacronym" in the November 1983 edition of the Washington Post monthly neologism contest. The newspaper quoted winning reader "Meredith G. Williams of Potomac" defining it as the "same as an acronym, except that the words were chosen to fit the letters".
Differences from acronyms
An acronym is a word derived from the initial letters of the words of a phrase:For example, the word radar comes from "Radio Detection and Ranging".
By contrast, a backronym is constructed by taking an existing word already in common usage, and creating a new phrase using the letters in the word as the initial letters of the words in the phrase. For example, the United States Department of Justice assigns to their Amber Alert program the meaning "America's Missing: Broadcast EmergencyResponse", although the term originally referred to Amber Hagerman, a 9-year-old abducted and murdered in Texas in 1996. Backronyms can be constructed for educational purposes, for example to form mnemonics. An example of such a mnemonic is the Apgar score, used to assess the health of newborn babies. The rating system was devised by and named after Virginia Apgar, but ten years after the initial publication, the bacronym APGAR was coined in the US as a mnemonic learning aid: Appearance, Pulse, Grimace, Activity, and Respiration.
A snowclone is a neologism for a type of cliché and phrasal template originally defined as "a multi-use, customizable, instantly recognizable, time-worn, quoted or misquoted phrase or sentence that can be used in an entirely open array of different variants".
An example of a snowclone is "grey is the new black", a version of the template "X is the new Y". X and Y may be replaced with different words or phrases – for example, "comedy is the new rock 'n' roll".[2] The term "snowclone" can be applied to both the original phrase and to any new phrase that uses its formula. Many Internet memes are snowclones: for example, the meme "obvious troll is obvious" actually originated as "fun toys are fun" and has been generalized to many other statements of the form "X Y is X".
A snowclone conveys information by using a familiar verbal formula and the cultural knowledge of the audience. A variant snowclone may refer to completely different things from the original (in the example above, colors versus types of performance). The original and the variant express similar relationships and can be understood using the same trope. For example, "grey is the new black" is a well-known expression meaning that grey clothing now has the same social functions that black clothing used to have. A well-used twist on this is "black is the new black". An audience that has never heard the phrase "comedy is the new rock 'n' roll" can still recognize the structure and understand it to mean that comedy is taking on some of the same social functions that are usually attributed to rock music.
A mondegreen is the mishearing or misinterpretation of a phrase as a result of near-homophony, in a way that gives it a new meaning. It most commonly is applied to a line in a poem or a lyric in a song. American writer Sylvia Wright coined the term in her essay "The Death of Lady Mondegreen," published in Harper's Magazine in November 1954."Mondegreen" was included in the 2000 edition of the Random House Webster's College Dictionary. Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary added the word in 2008. The phenomenon is not limited to English, with examples cited by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, in the Hebrew song Háva Nagíla ("Let's Be Happy"),and in Bollywood movies.
A closely related category is soramimi—songs that produce unintended meanings when homophonically translated to another language.
The unintentionally incorrect use of similar-sounding words or phrases in speaking is a malapropism. If there is a connection in meaning, it can be called an eggcorn. If a person stubbornly sticks to a mispronunciation after being corrected, that can be described as mumpsimus.
· A meme (pron.: /ˈmiːm/; meem)is a term employed in certain theories of culture to refer to "an idea, behavior or style that spreads from person to person within a culture."A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes in that they self-replicate, mutate and respond to selective pressures.
· An "internet meme" is a concept that spreads rapidly from person to person via the internet usually in a humorous way, largely through internet-based E-mail, blogs, forums,Imageboards, social networking sites, instant messaging and video streaming sites such as YouTube.
· Cloud cuckoo land: a proposal that the speaker regards as foolish or impractical (named derived from the ancient Greek play The Birds by Aristophanes)
· In publishing and graphic design, lorem ipsum is placeholder text (filler text) commonly used to demonstrate the graphicelements of a document or visual presentation, such as font, typography, and layout, by removing the distraction of meaningful content. The lorem ipsum text is typically a section of a Latin text by Cicero with words altered, added and removed that make it nonsensical in meaning and not proper Latin.
· A nonce word is a word used only "for the nonce"—on a particular occasion that is not expected to recur. Quark, for example, was formerly a nonce word in English, appearing only in James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. Murray Gell-Mann then adopted it to name a new class of subatomic particle. The use of the term nonce word in this way was apparently the work of James Murray, the influential editor of the Oxford English Dictionary. Compare "hapax legomenon". An example of a nonce word in the works of Shakespeare is "honorificabilitudinitatibus".
· widget, referring to some theoretical object. It was originally most commonly used in describing the output of a hypothetical business; in computer technology, it refers to any arbitrary item that may be made to appear on the screen.
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