Where do new words come from – or Homer’s humble contribution to English
March 26th 2010 01:56
Let us give you two answers to the question in the headline: the academic answer and the fun answer.
The study of the origin of words is called etymology. The quickest way to find the etymology of a given word is a good dictionary such as the venerable Merriam-Webster or the 12-volume wonder of the full Oxford English Dictionary.
As the Merriam-Webster web site explains, “If the word was created in English, the etymology shows, to whatever extent is not already obvious from the shape of the word, what materials were used to form it.”
Quite.
The second way of looking at it is through the eyes – or should that be mouth – of Homer Simpson.
One if America’s favourite social commentators, Homer and his co-stars in The Simpsons are this year celebrating 20 years of television life, and to honour this a London-based translation business decided to conduct a survey rating the contributions the opinionated Homer has made to the English language.
Those contributions are considerable. Homer, with the help of the script writers behind his character, has such a history of coining terms that Jurga Zilinskiene, chief executive of Today Translations, said, “Homer Simpson must be the most influential wordsmith since Shakespeare."
Here is a short list of Homerisms:
Doh! Defined as: Expressing frustration at the realization that things have turned out badly or not as planned, or that one has just said or done something foolish.
Introubulate: To get someone into trouble.
Craptacular: Spectacularly crap.
Eat my shorts: A Homer insult, this is a corruption of a similar but less polite line from The Breakfast Club, a 1985 American teen film written and directed by John Hughes.
The survey, conducted by Zilinskiene’s Today Translations, asked a series of international language experts which Homerism they considered the most important contribution to English.
The answer? Well, doh! Of course.
“Doh!'' was added to the online Oxford English Dictionary in 2001.
timesonline.co.uk
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