September 9 - Celebrate New Words Today!

Posted on September 9, 2021

Key points

This is an update of my post published on September 9, 2010:

On this day in 1839, John Herschel made the first glass-plate photographic negative. This early photographer actually invented the word photograph. Herschel also came up with the terms negative (in the photographic sense) and snap-shot.

You may already know that the word photograph combines two Greek roots: photo means “light,” and graph means “write.”

On this day in 1947, early computer whiz Grace Hopper was having trouble with her mainframe computer. She opened it up and found a dead moth that had shorted out a relay. She used tweezers to remove the moth and was able to fix the computer.

Apparently, people had already used the word “bug” when describing computer problems, so Hopper wrote in her logbook, “First actual case of bug being found.” She even taped the moth into the book for proof! Loads of people talked about Hopper debugging her computer—and so the word debug became popular.

By the way, apparently the moth is on display in the Smithsonian museum!

New words are added to English (and other languages)
all the time. Above are two recent additions to the
dictionary. Even more recent additions are pandemic-
related terms like “pod,” “bubble,” and “long hauler.”

What do you think will be added to dictionaries in 2022?

It’s interesting to learn how words come to be. English is made up of an awful lot of words from other languages—especially French, Latin, and Greek. Putting existing words (in any language) together to make a new word, like snap-shot or photograph, is one common way that new words are coined, and repurposing old words in a new way, like negative or debug, is another common method of creating new terms. Two more methods of word creation are shortening a word and adopting an acronym (when the first letters of each word are put together and pronounced as if they were a word, such as NASA). And of course, some words are simply made up purely out of thin air.

Scuba is an acronym for Self-Contained
Underwater Breathing Apparatus.

See if you can identify how each of these words was invented:

(Choose from combining words, repurposing word, shortening word, acronym, or made up out of thin air.)

snafu (which means a BIG mistake or mess)

television

laser

grok (which means to deeply and intuitively understand something or someone)

web (as in the internet)

airport
chortle

Apparently chortle is a delightful word. Next to its
definition I saw photos of actor Goldie Hahn laughing,
laughing babies, and this laughing penguin.

ANSWERS:

1) snafu is an acronym meaning Situation Normal—All Fouled Up

2) television is a combination of the root tele, meaning “far” and vision, meaning “sight”

3) fax is short for facsimile, which means exact copy

4) laser is an acronym meaning Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation

5) grok is a word made up (out of thin air) by sci-fi writer Robert Heinlein

6) web is an old word (referring of course to a spider’s construction) that has been used for a new purpose—the World Wide Web

7) airport is a combination of the words air and port

8) chortle is a word made up (out of thin air) by Lewis Carroll (author of Alice in Wonderland) for his poem Jabberwocky; it is now used to mean a snorting chuckle