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this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2023
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No Stupid Questions
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No such thing. Ask away!
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Words aren't created by definitions.
Definitions are summaries of the usage of words.
Usage comes first, not definition. Dictionaries, glossaries, etc. are a commentary on usage, attempting to explain to new users of a word what the other people already using that word mean by it.
If someone starts calling some teddy-bears "squee-bears", they don't have to have a written-out definition in mind before they do this. Maybe later, if the term "squee-bear" catches on, someone will write down a definition for it, as a summary of how they've observed the term being used.
You'd have to be pretty strict about what you mean by 'definition' in order to claim this. When words are coined, it seems likely that the speaker knows what he means by the word, even if he hasn't written the definition down somewhere
When Bob comes up with the word "squee-bear", he knows a squee-bear when he sees one, but he might not yet have worked out exactly what makes it a squee-bear to him. He might not yet be able to offer a definition. And if Bob talks about squee-bears to Alice and Charlie, they might start using the word in slightly different ways from Bob.
This sort of thing happens in the history of science, for instance. People start talking about "planets" (originally meaning "wandering stars") or "atoms" ("indivisible units") and then only later does a community of speakers nail down exactly what they mean by "planet" or "atom" and it turns out that planets aren't stars and atoms aren't indivisible.
For people, language use is axiomatic — and messy. We talk about things even when we don't know what they are; we talk about things even when we're not 100% sure what we mean.
Definitions come later.
People run into problems when they put definitions ahead of reality. That's what we see, for example, when creationists try to talk about "species", or transphobes about "woman". They act as if they want a simplistic definition they learned as a child to apply forever, in all context, and for anyone who disagrees to be just wrong. But that's not how language works and it's not how reality works.
I'm not disagreeing that it can sometimes happen as you've illustrated above. I am saying that it often does happen that coiners of new words know just what they mean by them. The person who came up with 'electrocute' knew exactly what he meant by it - to kill with electricity (notice how the word is a portmanteau of electricity and execute). That the word has started to be used by some as a word to mean something less specific is to me unfortunate, but is a good example of how words change over time. At any rate, it seems obvious that sometimes the definitions of words arrive fully formed at their birth, though not always so
Well, it certainly did, and that is the way I use it. I have heard people use it in other ways
I am saying that the word had a particular meaning when it was coined. Many people seem to use it for other things, and the dictionary reflects this. It seems odd to mean that a word that is almost nakedly a combination of electricity and execute is used to not mean killed by electricity, but it is the case
I'm not really sure what your objection is to what I've said.
Excellent write up !
The vast majority of words in natural languages aren’t created by somebody like an invention. They slowly form over time and over populations. In fact, I don’t think any of the words in your comment were “coined” in the sense that, say, Shakespeare coined “dwindle”.
Just like species change, I suppose for any precise definition and pronunciation of a word, you could find a person who was the first to use it, but it would almost always be a tiny variation of an existing word, and wouldn’t be considered “new” to a native speaker at that time and place, just a mild accent.
Going off on a tangent here, but the chances that Shakespeare truly invented any words or more than a handful of distinguishable uses is vanishingly small. What Shakespeare did was (1) be a half-educated middle class rube, (2) get popular enough that his colleagues wanted to collect his plays and a printer wanted to publish them, and (3) retained his reputation through the generations so that volume of plays wasn't left to rot.
He was absolutely brilliant, don't get me wrong (most Anti-Stratfordians are a weird combination of classist and ignorant), but the brilliance lies in the ways he played with the forms of poetry and drama, how he found the humanity in so many of his characters (though not all), and how he corralled all of his influences, cultural, literary, personal, and historical, into wholes that were way beyond the sum of their parts. Given the rigidity of Tudor education and expectations of the upper classes, I'd argue a unique voice like his would almost have to come from an "upstart crow." From the perspective of linguistic novelty though, by and large his was just the first known use of words, which were likely in some degree of use in at least one of his various communities (actors, writers, Londoners, and Strafordians to name a few). The OED can only cite the earliest written sources its researchers have found. The fact that so many of "his" communities were poorly documented in the historical and literary record probably explains most of the words ascribed to him.