Invented
Words
New
words appear in English every day. Do you know how these words
are born? Read the following passage to find various ways English
words are invented.
Scholars
guess that English has about 600 000 words, but there are
probably more. New words continue to come into the language
at such a rate that no dictionary could possibly keep up with
them. The old words which were born centuries ago in the Anglo-Saxon,
Germanic and French languages make up four fifths of the English
language. The other one fifth is made up partly of borrowed
words and partly of three other kinds of words: words from
the names of peoples and places; imitative words; and invented
words.
Ampere, volt and watt are all units of electricity,
and they are named for the men who discovered them; Andre
M. Ampere, a French physicist; Alessandro Volta, an Italian
physicist; and James Watt, a Scottish engineer and inventor.
Nowadays we all drink pasteurized milk, that is, milk which
is clean and purified. Pasteurized gets its name from Louis
Pasteur, a French doctor who invented the process for purifying
milk. There are many words like this in the English language.
Imitative words are words that sound like
the thing or action they stand for. Here are some examples:
buzz |
click |
bang |
mumble |
chirp |
bawl |
crash |
clap |
mutter |
giggle |
hum |
gulp |
There
is no need to say anything else about these words, for they
speak for themselves. You can probably think of
many more.
Then there are the invented words. English-speaking
people have always made up words as it suited them, and they
continue to do so every day. One kind of invented word is
one which is made up of two other words. Dictionaries call
this kind of word a compound. If you put "play" and "thing"
together, you get the compound, "plaything". How many can
you add to this list?
raincoat |
milkshake
|
upstairs
|
standstill
|
headlight
|
shutout |
sailboat
|
downstairs
|
income |
headline
|
As well as putting two whole words together,
we also add parts of words called prefixes and suffixes to
the whole words. Most prefixes and suffixes come from Latin
or Greek, and each has a special meaning of its own. When
we add a prefix before a word or a suffix at the end of it,
we change its meaning. For example, the prefix re- means "again".
If we add re- to "do" or "paint", we get two new words meaning
"do again" and "paint again". Un- means "the opposite of"
or "not". By adding un- to "happy" or "kind", we get "unhappy"
or "unkind", meaning "not happy" and "not kind". The suffix
-ness means "the condition of". "Happiness" and "kindness"
are the conditions of being happy and kind. It is easy to
see the meanings of unhappiness and unkindness. The word to
which we attach the prefixes and suffixes is called the root
word. In a word like unkindness the root word is kind.
Some words, like astronaut, are made up entirely
of Greek or Latin prefixes and suffixes. Astro- is a Greek
prefix meaning "having to do with the stars"; naut- means "having to do with
sailing". So, an astronaut is a "star-sailor".
Other words can be root words, prefixes or suffixes, depending
on where they come in the word. Remember, the prefix comes
first, the root
word second, and the suffix last. As an example, let's take
the word "graph" and build several different invented words
with it by adding prefixes and suffixes to it or using it
as a prefix or suffix. Graph by itself means anything which
is shown to us in pictures or writing. For instance, your
teacher might want to keep track of your reading progress
by drawing a graph of your reading test scores, or a businessman
might draw graphs which show the ups and downs of his company's
sales records. Now, by adding the prefixes and suffixes listed
below to graph, we can make several new words. Notice that
graph is part of a longer suffix as well as a suffix by itself.
Prefixes |
|
Suffixes |
auto- |
self |
-graphy |
study of; art of |
bio- |
life |
-graph |
something written |
phono- |
sound |
-ic |
similar to; like |
photo- |
light |
-ology |
study of |
tele- |
distant |
-phone |
sound |
Here are some words made with
"graph".
autograph—signature;
a person's name written in his or her handwriting
biography—story of a person's life
autobiography—study of a person's
life written by himself or herself
graphology—study of handwriting
telegraph—distant writing
phonograph—writing or a picture in
sound
photograph—writing or a picture in
light
photography—art of taking pictures
graphic—clearly written or drawn |
You may have noticed that you can make even
other words using some of these prefixes and suffixes without
graph. "Biology" is the study of life. What do you think is
the meaning of "biologic"? If the prefix anti- means "against,"
what does "antibiotic" really mean? There are hundreds of
Latin and Greek prefixes in the English language, and the
possibilities for inventing new words are endless. Every day,
as we make new discoveries in science and technology, we invent
new words to describe them. Many of these new words are combinations
of root words and prefixes and suffixes which have already
existed in English for centuries.
Another kind of invented word is the nonsense
word. Some nonsense words are used for a while by only a few
people and then disappear completely from the language, never
to be used again. Others, when they become popular enough
and are used over a period of time, become a permanent part
of the language. If enough people decide and agree on the
meaning of an invented word, it is here to stay. Some examples
of everyday modern words which probably began as nonsense
words centuries ago are: bad, big, lad, lass, chat, job and
fun. Linguists
guess that these are nonsense words because they have not
been able to trace them back to any of the ancestor languages.
Just who invented them, and when or where remains
a puzzle. Puzzle itself is one of these mystery words. No
one knows where it came from.
Lewis Carroll, author of Alice in Wonderland
and Through the Looking Glass, was a great inventor of nonsense
words. As a matter of fact, he created a whole language of
nonsense. Most of Carroll's nonsense words are not used in
English, except for "chortle". Chortle, Carroll tells us,
is a cross between a chuckle and a snort. The word is formed
by packing two different meanings together in it. The dictionary
calls such words blends. A fairly recent blend, which, unfortunately,
we hear almost every day, is "smog," a combination of smoke
and fog.
People invent nonsense
words by combining certain sounds that just seem to fit the
things or actions they describe. Often we make up words for
anything which is basically rather silly. Spoof was invented
by an English comedian some fifty years ago. It means "to
poke fun at". Hornswoggle
was used a great deal in the United States during the nineteenth
century, and it means "to cheat". If a dishonest politician
wants to hornswoggle the taxpayers, he invents a "boondoggle,"
which is a useless, expensive project which does nobody any
good. Fairly recently someone invented the word "gobbledygook".
When people talk or write using long, fancy words that really
mean nothing, we call it gobbledygook. Unfortunately, many
people use gobbledygook because they want to seem more important
than they are, or because they don't really want people to
understand what they mean or what they are doing. So, when
the dishonest politician wants to hornswoggle the public with
a boondoggle, he usually explains things in gobbledygook.
When Lewis Carroll was writing his books the
word gobbledygook had not been invented yet, but Carroll would
have known exactly what it meant. Carroll loved to spoof or
poke fun at people who used fancy, important-sounding words
when simple language would have done better. In one part of
Through the Looking Glass, Alice has a conversation with Humpty
Dumpty in which Humpty Dumpty insists words can mean whatever
he wants them to mean. Alice insists that this is impossible.
If everyone did that no one would understand anyone else.
The conversation goes like this:
"But ‘glory' doesn't mean ‘a nice knockdown
argument'," Alice objected.
"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in
rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to
mean—neither more nor less."
"The question is," said Alice,
"whether you
can make words mean so many different things."
"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty,
"which
is to be the master—that's all."
The question is, just as Humpty Dumpty said,
which is to be master. But Humpty Dumpty used words in an
odd way, and that made him a master of gobbledygook, not a
master of language. A master of language knows what words
really mean, and where they come from; knows when to use big,
important ones and when to use the shorter, equally important
simple ones. Winston Churchill was a great British prime minister.
He was also a great writer, truly a master of language. He
said once, "Short words are best, and old words when they
are short, are best of all."
(1 545 words)
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