Words, words, words

Each year The Washington Post conducts a neologism contest. It’s a fun way of creating a new word. From what my cousin Lakshman Menon has sent me, the contest appears to consist of two parts, writes Karan Thapar.

Each year The Washington Post conducts a neologism contest. It’s a fun way of creating a new word. From what my cousin Lakshman Menon has sent me, the contest appears to consist of two parts. The first asks readers to supply alternative meanings for common words of everyday usage. The second asks them to alter a well-known word by adding, subtracting or changing one letter and then suggest a new meaning for this creation. The winning entries had me in splits.

HT Image

First, the new meanings for words we all know and regularly use. It seems there were 16 winners but six are particularly clever. They appear as you would expect to find them in a dictionary if the new meanings overtake the original ones. (1) Coffee (n.): the person upon whom one coughs. (2) Flabbergasted (adj.): when you are appalled at how much weight you have gained. (3) Willy-nilly (adj.): impotent. (4) Negligent (adj.): the condition in which you absent-mindedly answer the door in your nightgown. (5) Balderdash (n.): a rapidly receding hairline. (6) Circumvent (n.): an opening in the front of boxer shorts worn by jewish men.

The second half of The Washington Post contest is, no doubt, more demanding. The contestants are asked to both alter an existing word and then suggest a meaning for it. Obviously the second has to connect with the first. That is the difficult part.

I’ve rarely heard neologisms trip off Indian tongues. Perhaps the editor of Hindustan Times might organise a contest to judge how inventive and witty we are?

But a neologism we badly need is a word for almost the opposite — that is using a word to mean something it did decades ago although today it means something very different.

For example, take the word ‘gay’. Mummy, who’s just turned 93, still uses it to describe the men she knows. This is how she introduced an 80-year-old general the other day: “He was quite a gay lad in his time.” As he blushed, I wondered if Mummy had stumbled on the truth.

The prize, however, goes to the sub-editor of one of our more highly regarded English newspapers. Subbing an analysis of Chief Justice Shah’s Section 377 judgement decriminalising homosexuality, he rang a colleague for advice: “The word gay appears twice in the same sentence. Do you think I should change the second to cheerful?”

The views expressed by the author are personal