Forget about Peak Oil, here’s the real looming crisis: we’re running out of new words. Do you realize how hard it is, in our hyperactive age, to come up with a word that hasn’t already been invented for some purpose or another? Surely we’ve all had the experience of mistyping a word into Google and nevertheless hitting a handful of results. So as a little experiment, I made up some strings of letters that sounded like they could be words, checked in the dictionary that none of them actually exists as a conventional English word, and asked Google to go look for them. Here’s how many hits I got.
- antrith (865)
- splicky (230)
- queigh (43)
- nurdle (885)
- tobnet (53)
“Splicky” is a pretty sweet-sounding word, actually; I’ll have to start dropping it into conversation. Admittedly, most non-words appear on Google as abbreviations or computer terms or simple nonsense, and furthermore it’s not that hard to invent random strings that don’t get any hits. Still, I’m worried. If Shakespeare were alive today, I’m pretty sure he’d feel that Google was cramping his style, coinage-wise.
Algorithmic information theory says that the amount of information in a string can be measured by the length of the shortest possible program that can produce this string as output. Unfortunately, for a sufficiently large string there is no way to know what is the shortest program that will output it.
Still, it would be fun to try on some of those German or Icelandic words…
just had to….
Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll
`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!”
He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought —
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.
And, as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!
One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.
“And, has thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!’
He chortled in his joy.
`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
My family often went on a hikes when I was a little twerp (as opposed to a big one), and on one occasion my kid brother was breaking in a new pair of hiking boots. My dad asked how he liked them, and my brother replied “They’re good! They’ve got lots of gription!”
(google reveals it’s even a band name!! Nothing new under the sun…)
haha, John, yeah, you have to realize… they put the deadlines in december/january so that they have three months to procrastinate before spending a week looking at all 500 applications…
Also: all this discussion of new words reminds me of a dream I once had in high school–to invent slang and have it catch on (spreading like wildfire across the country). My friend and I tried a few times, but it never worked because we just didn’t have contact with enough people (and perhaps weren’t persistent enough). But now in the internet, we at cosmicvariance have somewhat more reach. We could pick a definition for a word and try to use it as much as possible in our postings on other blogs… probably people will just ignore us but hey it might work and then we’d be famous! 🙂
Since Jaberwocky has entered, I have a open door to introduce the translated poetry from Stanislaw Lem: Cyberiad. This amazing translation from Polish to English keeps Lem’s six lines of rhymes (the first piece with every word beginning with the letter ‘s’).
Here we have two robots dueling in poetry. One is challenged to write a poem about a haircut, but it must be : lofty, noble, tragic, timeless, full of love, treachery, retribution, and have quiet heroism in the face of certain doom.
——-
Seduced, shaggy Samson snored.
She scissord short. Sorely shorn,
Soon shackled slave, Samson signed,
Silently scheming,
Sightlessly seeking
Some saveage, spectacular suicide.
“Well what do you say to that?” asked Trurl, his arms folded proudly.
But Klapaucius was already shouting:
“Now all in g! A sonnet, trochaic hexameter, about an old cyclotron who kept sixteen artificial mistresses, blue and radioactive, had four wings, three purple pavilions, two lacquered chests, each containing exactly one thousand medallions bearing the likeness of Czar Murdicog the Headless…”
“Grinding gleeful gears, Gerontogyron grabbed/Giggling gynecobalt-60 golems,” began the machine, but Trurl leaped to the console, shut off the power and turned, defending the machine with his body.
“Enough!” he said, hoarse with indignation. “How dare you waste a great talent on such drivel? Either give it decent poems to write or I call the whole thing off!”
“What, those aren’t decent poems?” protested Klapaucius.
“Certainly not! I didn’t build a machine to solve ridiculous crossword puzzles! That’s hack work, not Great Art! Just give it a topic, any topic, as diffiicult as you like …”
Klapaucius thought, and thought some more. Finally he nodded and said:
“Very well. Let’s have a love poem, lyrical, pastoral, and expressed in the language of pure mathematics. Tensor algebra mainly, with a little topology and higher calculus, if need be. But with feeling, you understand, and in the cybernetic spirit.”
“Love and tensor algebra? Have you taken leave of your senses?”
——-
“Nurdle” is a semi-accepted term to describe a style of shot or play by a batman in cricket, meaning nudging the ball around and into gaps (rather than striking lusty blows).
eg: “he’s nurdling it around now, but he’ll have to start looking for the boundary soon”, or “and he nurdles it to short fine leg and brings up his fifty”.
Cheers,
RB