Does talking websterize wordage?
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An old argument, in today's Get Fuzzy:
LING 001 Essay Question: Explain why Rob and Bucky are both wrong.
August 5, 2011 @ 7:25 am · Filed by Mark Liberman under Linguistics in the comics
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An old argument, in today's Get Fuzzy:
LING 001 Essay Question: Explain why Rob and Bucky are both wrong.
August 5, 2011 @ 7:25 am · Filed by Mark Liberman under Linguistics in the comics
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Sili said,
August 5, 2011 @ 8:24 am
Rob is wrong, like most people, in thinking that The Dictionary™ is somehow the arbiter of what is and what isn't Real Words™ (I blame Johnson).
I'm not so sure why Bucky is wrong. What he utters is are perfectly wellformed words in English; they conform to phonology, morphology and syntax as far as I can tell, and they are easily understood and thus convey meaning without obstacle.
I actually like "with all due disrespect", myself, and I think I need to incorporate in my own vocabulary for the next time I encounter a troll.
[(myl) It's true in this case that Bucky's neologisms are instances of regular English derivational morphology — wordage, websterize — and therefore can be counted as "words of English" without further ado. But he's wrong to claim that "if I said it, it's a word". If he had uttered a Chinese word with a Somali derivational affix, for example, that wouldn't thereby create a "word of English" (or of Chinese or Somali or any other language), unless a number of other unlikely things also happened.
I guess I should also point out that websterize, though not in the OED, was used in the early years of the 20th century to refer to a certain kind of heating conversion:
As for snackage, it's an instance of the general fashion for cutesy -age affixation (foodage, boozage, bloggage, …), which (I think) we've covered on LL at some point in the past. ]
Jim said,
August 5, 2011 @ 8:39 am
I'd say it's more that he said, "If I said it, it's a word" – the words he invented are indeed true to the spirit of English, but simply uttering a series of sounds doesn't mean that you just made a word.
Adam said,
August 5, 2011 @ 8:58 am
Oddly, this reminds me of the sorites paradox.
If I invent a string of sounds/letters and start using it, it isn't a "real word". If one friend starts using it, it still isn't a "real word". … But when enough people use it, it has become a real word.
Of course, the number can be smaller for technical jargon. Maybe more native speakers use "snackage" than "morpheme". ;-)
Svafa said,
August 5, 2011 @ 9:05 am
Utterance of a "word" doesn't make it canon. To my mind, Bucky's argument is similar to the common internet argument that so long as you understand the intended meaning, the spelling, or actual word choice, doesn't matter. To some (limited) extent that may be true for communication, but I would argue it's not for language.
Neil said,
August 5, 2011 @ 9:13 am
(Apols for not trying to answer the question, but just adding some info re snackage)
I have definitely heard and probably even used the word snackage myself. Part of a trend to put the suffix '-age' onto the end of everything. And here is some evidence:
from Hunter Davies, "renowned author of over 40 books and columnist in numerous newspapers", returning his former university haunts in this article.
Ozzy said,
August 5, 2011 @ 9:36 am
I guess Rob is wrong because he assumes that only the words that the lexicographers have selected as "words' in their dictionaries are in effect words which disregards all the words coming from new dialects, language borrowings and even the words that were taken off the dictionary. As for Fuzzy, he is wrong because utterances cannot instantly become words used in a language because there are many sociolinguistic steps to the creation of words and it usually involves more than one person understanding and using the words.
(PS: I am actually just a young student in linguistics. I answered the essay question by pure reflex. I would be happy to be corrected)
Frank said,
August 5, 2011 @ 9:42 am
Talking websterizes wordage to the same extent that verbing weirds language.
J.W. Brewer said,
August 5, 2011 @ 9:43 am
Would Rob be satisfied if "snackage" in the sense Bucky intends was in http://www.urbandictionary.com? It is – complete with a prescriptivist peeve that "some idiots call it lunchage which is completly [sic] wrong." (But if you go looking for "websterize" there, don't say I didn't try to warn you off.)
Ellen K. said,
August 5, 2011 @ 9:45 am
Sili's answer, I think, doesn't really say why Rob is wrong. It just puts a label on his thinking, without explaining why that thinking is wrong.
Rob is wrong because not all words are in the dictionary. Sometimes words aren't there because the dictionary isn't comprehensive enough. Sometimes because it's a word in another language. Sometimes because the word is too new. Some words aren't in the dictionary because they are personal names. Like, "Bucky". And many times a word's not in the dictionary because it's not a base form. Or because it's has a prefix or suffix.
Bucky's harder. I think we must, in fairness, assume that the "it" in, "If I said it, it's a word" does not refer to utterances made of multiple words. I think he's wrong because he narcissistically believes that if he personally says something, it's a word, as distinct from if someone says something, it's a word. But that's psychology, not linguistics.
He's wrong because it is possible to create utterances that aren't words, and aren't made of words. Such as scat singing. And that's still not really a proper explanation.
Oh yeah, Bucky also seems to somewhat share Rob's notion that if it's a word, it's in the dictionary, thus "websterizes", but he seems to take his personal usage as a higher authority than the dictionary.
J.W. Brewer said,
August 5, 2011 @ 9:59 am
wiktionary does not currently include "snackage" but its search engine turns up "snackage" in an example sentence that was previously in the entry for "permit" but not in the current version ("For snackage there's a 1950s-themed diner plus a barbie on the terrace, weather permitting.").
Is the Ling 101 (I think I started way back when with Ling 110a, due to the peculiarities of local class-numbering conventions . . .) answer that a native speaker's internal lexicon is, according to some views, in practice augmented by the range of potential coinages with transparently compositional meanings that will result from applying morphologically productive affixes to known words according to the rules governing the particular affix? The -age suffix is interesting because its degree of productivity may be a function of time/place/register/class-or-subculture.
Ross Presser said,
August 5, 2011 @ 10:05 am
The question is not just "what is a word" but "why does it matter?" If words are just a statistical snapshot of what a given population of people use to communicate using sounds made by their mouths … then baby cries are words. There are a lot more babies crying every day — and getting attention from their cries — than there are people using the word "morpheme" every day.
So why does Rob even care that Bucky used a non-word? Bucky got his communication through, unambiguously and clearly understood immediately, which is a lot more than the "had had had had" writers can say. And yet the urge to say "that's not a word" is easy to identify with; I've said it myself, numerous times.
What's really going on here?
Erik Zyman Carrasco said,
August 5, 2011 @ 10:22 am
On slangy -age, I've also seen boobage and myself used chillage.
Spell Me Jeff said,
August 5, 2011 @ 10:26 am
I am not convinced that Rob is wrong. Or if he is wrong, I do not think we can know exactly why he is wrong.
His claim is that "snackage" is not a word. For his claim to be testable, there needs to be agreement on what a "word" is. I think we all can recognize a "word" to the extent that Potter Stewart can recognize pornography. Asked to define the concept unambiguously, however, and the more intelligent of us will turn to a linguistics text, where we will find that the term does enjoy a certain amount of ambiguity, particularly when it comes to the demarcation problem. None of which is a problem per se. The problem is that we do not know in the first panel which definition of "word" Rob is using (or if he himself knows). So his claim cannot be tested in any meaningful way.
I think the comments thus far are making a link between Rob's claim in panel one and his challenge in panel two. Indeed, the challenge can be read as a definition, or at least a demarcation criterion, of "wordage." But the strip makes it clear that Rob's challenge is a response to Bucky's claim, also in panel two, that speaking a word Websterizes it. Does Rob's challenge also identify the definition of "word" implied by panel one? We cannot tell, because the context has shifted. It may simply be the next step in the conversation, a refutation of the Websterizing claim and nothing more.
Jerry Friedman said,
August 5, 2011 @ 10:47 am
+snackage: 139,000 supposed Ghits, 907 visible
+tagmeme: 53,900 supposed, 779 visible
At a glance, more of the snackage hits than the tagmeme hits seem like uses rather than mentions of the word.
(Morpheme is a good deal more common.)
D.O. said,
August 5, 2011 @ 11:47 am
Sili
Easily understood? It took me good 2 minutes to get that websterize has nothing to do with the World Wide Web. Needless to say, the ease of understanding has nothing to do with something being a word or not.
Nick Lamb said,
August 5, 2011 @ 11:47 am
“For his claim to be testable, there needs to be agreement on what a "word" is”
It's OK for there to be a set of things about which we don't know whether they are words or not. This only affects the testability of Rob's claim _if_ "snackage" is one of those things.
Uly said,
August 5, 2011 @ 11:50 am
Rob is wrong for the obvious reason. I loathe "that's not a word!". What does that phrase even mean? If you said it, and I understood what you meant, how is it not a word?
Bucky is wrong because he's a cat, and cats aren't supposed to talk, in words or otherwise.
Rod Johnson said,
August 5, 2011 @ 12:04 pm
But surely "if I said it" is intended to mean more than merely "if I uttered it." It's more like "if I uttered it as a competent speaker of a language intending to communicate to other competent speakers."
Alternatively, I could say that if I produce something that functions as a word in my language production process, it's a word. "Wug" in "this is a wug" is a word in this sense, though it may not be one in the "lexical item" sense.
parse said,
August 5, 2011 @ 12:05 pm
I'm not sure whether Bucky's wrong when he says, "If I said it, it's a word. My talking websterizes wordage automatically." He may not be making a general case that anything anyone said would be a word, or that anything he might possibly say would be a word. If you take a more restrictive interpretation, he's describing his language practice (knowing, for example, that he has not in the past and will not in the future, utter a Chinese word with a Somali derivational affix). Others may say things that aren't words, Bucky might think, but I don't do that kind of thing.
Ray Girvan said,
August 5, 2011 @ 12:27 pm
@Ozzy: I guess Rob is wrong because he assumes that only the words that the lexicographers have selected as "words' in their dictionaries …
I doubt it's even as deep as that. He's most likely wrong because most people's reasons for saying something isn't a word is because they've never encountered it, or have encountered it but it's not in the sociolect they were taught was correct.
Dan Hemmens said,
August 5, 2011 @ 12:38 pm
But surely "if I said it" is intended to mean more than merely "if I uttered it." It's more like "if I uttered it as a competent speaker of a language intending to communicate to other competent speakers.
I'm not sure even that's rigorous though, because even a competent speaker *can* make a mistake (or be willfully perverse).
Mark said,
August 5, 2011 @ 1:26 pm
I want a t-shirt that says "My talking websterizes wordage automatically."
And Bucky is at least partially wrong because he used "websterize"… and thus implicitly backed the notion that dictionaries are arbiters of word existence.
Glenn Bingham said,
August 5, 2011 @ 1:48 pm
Everyone is missing the formal distinction between "being a word" and "being among wordage." The Buckster clearly sets the domain of the current wordage as consistent with the Buckypedia, so any reference to Webster is not a plea to have Bucky's wordage accepted by the "official listing" that speakers of English use. He can only mean by websterizing that he has established an acceptability in the Buckypediac domain, a grammar understandable within the setting of the current company.
In my career, I have accumulated some Buckypediaisms that were perfectly acceptable as wordage, but will surely baffle any OEDer, including Noah Webster. In one setting, we spent hearn and got tied in the ray-bag. In another it made perfect sense to say, "Grab me fifty 101191's!" In another, heeltaps and cut necks were tossed into the cullet chute. Such wordage became essentialized for workage.
To quote a student, "You have to learn a whole new language to study linguistics." Yadda-yadda-yadda. It's just wordage!
Mark Etherton said,
August 5, 2011 @ 1:50 pm
Pace Neil, I'm not sure that Hunter Davies is good evidence for anything (especially since his definition of a toff is probably something on the lines of 'anyone not as interested in football as Hunter Davies', which must be about 65% of the adult male population of the UK). Isn't 'snackage' just an example of the phenomenon already considered on LL here: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2108 ?
[(myl) Not exactly — at least if you mean the discussion of "playful or expressive word formation" as involved in the use of pseudo-suffixes like -gasm. English has a perfectly standard suffix -age, which as the OED explains was applied "originally in words adopted from French, afterwards a living English formative", with the patterns
1. "From names of things, indicating that which belongs to or is functionally related to […] whence of English formation cellarage, cordage, fruitage, girderage, leafage, luggage, poundage, socage, vaultage, etc";
2. 'From names of persons, indicating function, sphere of action, condition, rank,[…] of English formation bondage, orphanage, parsonage, porterage, umpirage";
3. "From verbs expressing action, […] whence of English formation breakage, brewage, cleavage, postage, prunage, steerage, wreckage, etc."
Snackage could be a regular form of type 1 or type 3; wordage is of type 1, like boozage and boobage; etc.]
Ray Dillinger said,
August 5, 2011 @ 6:13 pm
"-age" in its newest common productive use as demonstrated by Bucky above appears to transform an indefinite count noun into a mass noun. Thus "snack" –> "snackage". The peever at Urbandictionary who claims that "lunchage" is a misuse is expressing a "sounds wrong" reflex because, I suppose, he probably has internalized "lunch" as either a definite or a non-count noun. FWIW, I have the same "sounds wrong" reflex when a specific instance of 'lunch' is considered. "lunchage" seems plausible only when talking about an indefinite set of lunches, perhaps typical lunches over a period of time or lunches consumed in a particular region.
[(myl) Do you have the same feelings about cordage, poundage, frontage, spillage, etc.?]
Barney said,
August 5, 2011 @ 7:50 pm
I think Spell Me Jeff's comment makes the most sense. So the question is what, if anything is Rob's "That's not a word" likely to mean. Only once we've considered that can we move on to consider whether its right or wrong.
I don't think he really means to make any particular claim about the world by saying "that's not a word". He may be expressing real or mock disapproval of Bucky's use of the word.
If we interrupted the cartoon after panel one to ask him what he meant, he'd be unlikely to clarify the precise meaning of his utterance (because it doesn't have a precise meaning), but would instead offer something that sounds like evidence to support his 'claim', perhaps by telling us that snackage isn't in the dictionary. I think he'd be unlikely to say "I just meant that it isn't in the OED".
So on that interpretation Rob isn't right or wrong, as he's not making any specific claim. He's just being annoying.
Bucky's clearly jesting, but he's what he says is untrue because there isn't a dictionary compiler spying on him and putting his every word into a Webster's dictionary, as his claim would suggest.
Ray Dillinger said,
August 5, 2011 @ 8:11 pm
[(myl) Do you have the same feelings about cordage, poundage, frontage, spillage, etc.?]
Briefly, yes. "Cordage" is rope, string, twine, etc considered as a mass noun. A particular pair of shoes weighing a couple of pounds is not "poundage," but an aggregate or indefinite set of shoes aggregating to some total weight is. "Frontage" and "spillage" likewise are amounts, not objects.
[(myl) But typical uses of e.g. cordage seem quite analogous to Bucky's "I sense some impending snackage", in which snackage is also a mass noun. From COCA:
Broken cordage blew out, bar-straight and deadly as flails on the howling torrent of wind …
Long skeins of cordage hung from pegs pounded into crossbeams above unfinished nets stretched across a frame
On the deck ahead, Gorran was a writhing mass of cordage.
Add some catnip, and Bucky might well become a writhing mass of snackage. But my favorite is:
The dry conditions that usually preserve basketry aren't here," says Erlandson of the cordage fragments." We think it's been pickled by bird poop."
]
Sili said,
August 6, 2011 @ 3:51 am
Exactly. It's the standard peevologist mindset: "I don't like it, therefore it is not a word." Incidentally, that kind of person can often be found to argue that even if a word is in the dictionary, it's still not "a word".
… he's a cartoon character, not a human human.
–o–
I see I fell into the Gricean trap of assuming that Bucky was arguing in good faith. As a result my brain insisted on imbuing meaning to his words, much like the standard deconstructions of "colourless greeen ideas sleep furiously".
Thus I took a narrow reading of "my talking" to mean what he had just said, rather than all conceivable random strings of syllables that he could make. I didn't expect him to mean that /tohuwabohu/ would be a word.
Similarly I read "websterize" more generally that "Websterize". Where the latter might indeed mean "included in the dictionary" the former has the broader meaning of "accepted" or "understandable" or "having a definition".
My bad.
Incidentally, Rob is also wrong in comparing the brain to a computer. The energy output of those three pounds of fat is constant – there's not off-switch. Overheating of the brain is not due to increased activity, but to reduced heatdissipation.
–o–
Not English, no. But if those Chinese explorers had indeed circumnavigated the globe and/or regularly made landfall in East Africa, I'd think it very likely that a pidgin arise to facilitate communication. Since Chinese, as I understand it, is isolating, the addition of Somali suffices &c. would seem more than likely. In fact, were Chinese words to be incorporated into Somali as a result of extended trading, it would be impossible not to give it the full agglutinative treatment that Wikipedia tells me is native to Somali.
AussieBel said,
August 6, 2011 @ 4:47 am
Bucky is wrong because meaning through language comes from social agreement or a meaning 'contract'. It can't be one way. If it was, a lot of the points Lewis Carroll's 'Alice in Wonderland' makes would be taken away. Bucky is saying another form of "It means what I want it to mean". Rob is just a slave to his dictionary. Do others think 'dictionary' could be defined as a list of popular language social contracts? A private joke accesses private word agreements.
Nick Lamb said,
August 6, 2011 @ 9:42 am
"Incidentally, Rob is also wrong in comparing the brain to a computer. The energy output of those three pounds of fat is constant – there's not off-switch"
Not true either, of course there's an off switch. Now, in something as complicated as a full grown human we have no idea how to get things working again if we switch it off, but that would have been true for the ordinary person confronted with an early computer too.
If you ignored the moral and legal obstacles and switched off a human you would discover their brain ceases to consume energy and cools down.
Now, in a modern computer there is a marked difference in power consumption (and thus heat output) depending on how much useful work is being done. But in older computers there is no "idle" mode and so there's no measurable difference between "idle" and "working as hard as possible" in terms of heat. It appears physiologists lack good measuring equipment for tracking the temperature of a normal (ie inside an intact skull, and alive) brain and there is an ongoing debate about exactly how the brain is kept at an optimal temperature.
Army1987 said,
August 6, 2011 @ 1:42 pm
As someone once put it in a Wikipedia talk page, if fuontain is not a word then in the sentence there is a fuontain in the garden there is no word between a and in. (Still, I think that word just has several meanings, one being approximately “a sequence of non-whitespace characters” and one being “a single-word (as in the previous sense) lexeme or inflected form thereof”.
Ellen K. said,
August 6, 2011 @ 2:21 pm
The brain is not all fat, and the energy used it not constant.
Ellen K. said,
August 6, 2011 @ 2:23 pm
As someone once put it in a Wikipedia talk page, if fuontain is not a word then in the sentence there is a fuontain in the garden there is no word between a and in.
I disagree with the logic. I think, rather, it shows that whether or not something is a word can depend on context.
Army1987 said,
August 6, 2011 @ 6:17 pm
It's not exactly constant, but it varies much less than one might expect (not more than 25% between deep non-REM sleep and intense intellectual activity, IIRC).
marcos said,
August 8, 2011 @ 2:27 am
Rob is wrong cuz presence or absence in the dictionary doesn't determine whether or not an utterance is a word in a given language. Rather, it must conform to certain rules that govern word formation in that language, or be a root word that is used and/or understood, etc.
Bucky is wrong cuz while it's true that every word he said in the strip was, in fact, a properly formed English word that should be understandable to any native speaker (judging from comments, non-Americans may have some difficulty with "websterize" though), it's not true that a native speaker simply making sounds with an intended meaning equals a word. For example, if I said "plprtnondlim" and said it meant the same thing as Bucky's "wordage", it wouldn't be a word because it's not comprehensible to a native speaker and it's not formed according to the internal rules of English. It could become a word (though this is obviously extremely unlikely) if that utterance were to become understood by the body of English speakers as meaning the same thing as "wordage".
Edward Carney said,
August 8, 2011 @ 12:25 pm
If Bucky'd been a bovine, he might have said silage and we could have avoided the whole ruction.
Snackage suggested itself as a parallel construct to silage, so, I assigned it to the category English word [ironic or humorous].
Silage comes from ensilage (primary stress on the first syllable) a French word which refers to the action of creating green fodder (similar to lavage, lissage, arbitrage, plissage, etc.). Ensilage was used to refer to the product, but, eventually, as English will do, the noun became silage and silage at one point was even used as a verb, bringing it all full circle.
Trevor said,
November 17, 2012 @ 12:34 am
I was thinking that "websterize" meant the intentional censorship of a medium, usually written, and presumably based on religious morality. I thought I had heard or seen it once upon a time. I was just ranting about network TV and the latest episode of Glee's "websterization" of the song "Greased Lightning" and then wondered: is that really a word, or was it just one I made up in my head years ago when I first read that Webster had the (ironic) audacity to censor the King James bible? See, for example:
http://www.bible-researcher.com/webster.html
I see now, though, that the word I was trying to remember was "bowdlerise." (Webster was an amateur.)