When I was a boy of ten or twelve, we used to take pleasure in throwing stones. Sometimes we threw stones at trees; sometimes we threw them at houses under construction, nerving ourselves up to break a window or two; sometimes we threw them at each other. This activity was known as “pooning goonies.” Where we got the phrase I do not know; possibly it was handed down to us by older boys; possibly it was the invention of somebody with an agile imagination. My American Heritage Dictionary gives “goon” in the ordinary sense as a thug or a fool. It gives “gooney bird” as an albatross. It says that “poon” is the name of an Asian tree used for masts and spars. My large two-volume Oxford dictionary gives “goon” as an obsolete form of gun, and “poon” once again as an Asian tree. None of us ten year-olds used these words in anything like these ways. The roots of our “poon” and “goonie” are lost in the mists of time.
A second word I cannot find the etymology for is “gunch,” pronounced with a hard “g.” As we used it when I was ten or twelve, it meant to injure, or damage, as in “I gunched my leg playing football.” None of my dictionaries give the word, which is very wrong of them as it is an extremely useful word.
I have always been interested in words. I can’t remember a time when I couldn’t read, although I could hardly have been reading much before I was six. By nine I was reading adult fiction. I can remember my parents watching in some puzzlement as I sat on the sofa reading John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men.” How much I got out of it, I don’t recall. In any case, most of my reading was of course the usual children’s books—the Oz books, Mark Twain, the Alice books of Lewis Carroll, Christopher Robin, and hundreds more, most of them largely forgotten by me as well as by everyone else. On rainy days at the family’s summer house I often read aloud to a gathering of cousins waiting out the rain. I could easily read eight hours a day. Not that I did nothing but read: I was an avid baseball fan and played the game a lot, along with football, volley ball, badminton and whatever else was going. But reading was a major activity, something I liked doing.
Thus I was inevitably delighted to hear the term “niquids” coined. It came about when my boys were around eight and ten or eleven. We were eating ice cream, and Geoff was mischievously jabbing his spoon into Andy’s ice cream to snatch away bites, at which point Andy shouted, “Get your niquids out of my ice cream.” Where he got the term I cannot tell you, anymore than I can give you the derivation of “poon,” but it remains in use in our family.
Another neologism invented by my children was “Fatso Wrango Bird.” I have no idea what a Fatso Wrango Bird looks like. I assume it is a mythical creature like the Phoenix or the Chimera. As readers up on their mythology will remember, the Phoenix was supposed to live several hundred years and then spontaneously go up in flames; the Chimera was usually represented as having a lion’s head, a goat’s body, and a serpent-like tail, but there were variations on this arrangement. I assume that the Fatso Wrango Bird was similarly mixed. It must have had wings of some sort. Fatso is clear enough, but Wrango is harder to pin down. Anyone versed in cowboy lore knows what a wrangler is, and wrangle means to dispute or quarrel noisily. As I see it, a Fatso Wrango Bird is a rather disputatious creature, perhaps the height of a ten-year-old boy, which could fly, which most ten-year-old boys cannot. It would, I should think, be rather frightening to have a Fatso Wrango Bird come swooping down on you just when you were setting off on your bicycle or skateboard. If you were quick enough you might be able to take a whack at it with the skateboard, but that would not be easy with a bicycle.
My cousin Gwil Brown, who was about my age, manufactured a good many words. He was an imaginative boy, but as a single child of literary parents, was often alone, and developed various games to occupy himself. One was dice baseball: each number on the dice had a value—a double, a walk, a strikeout, a home run. He had a whole league of teams duplicating the professional ones. New York was “Kroy Wen,” Boston was similarly reversed to become Notsob. I can’t remember how he managed Philadelphia and Cincinnati.
However, for coining neologism few trades can equal music. Musicians are by both training and inclination improvisers; the invention of words comes naturally to them. Inevitably musicians’ slang evolves over time, but some words have had relatively long lives, among them blues, rock, chick, bread, and jam. These words, however, are not neologisms, but old words given new meanings, for example “axe,” which means any type of musical instrument—flutes and electric organs are axes. Horn is used rather indiscriminately for any wind instrument, not just the French horn. Other words like “git-box” for guitar, “tubs” for drums, and “licorice stick” for clarinet have obvious derivations. (In fact, these terms were employed more by fans hoping to sound hip than by musicians, except jocularly. The term ‘hip’ used in this sense is not given in my O.E.D., but appears in the Oxford American Dictionary as slang meaning “well-informed, stylish;” my Random House College Dictionary has a similar definition.)
There is, of course, special terminology for the so-called drum “set.” In the marching bands from which popular orchestras in part descended, cymbals, bass drum, and snare drums were played by different people. In the small three and four piece groups that provided much of the music for dancing in an earlier day, it was necessary to develop a system in which all these percussion instruments could be handled by one person. A foot peddle was attached to the bass drum, and pairs of cymbals were screwed to a device, also worked by foot, by which the cymbals could be clashed: press down with the foot and the top cymbals rose, release the pressure and it dropped with a crash onto the bottom cymbal. This new instrument came to be called the “hi-hat,” after the top hats of that time which could be collapsed, a necessity at a gathering where a great many hats had to be checked or otherwise disposed of. The wires which run under the snare to produce a sort of rattle are supposed to resemble the snares used by hunters of birds and small animals. Then there are homemade terms like “doo-wop,” “boogie-woogie,” and others, which describe particular forms of music
Although “bread” for money is now widely used, it was probably originally a musicians’ term. Then there are words like “croon,” which sounds as if it must be new, but in fact goes back to Middle English “kron.’
Many neologisms are onomatopoetic, that is, suggested by a sound related to the subject of the word. In the popular literature of the American West both arrows and bullets were constantly zinging here and there. The best-known use of the word comes in a hit sung by, among others, Judy Garland, “Zing Went the Strings of My Heart,” which was sung in at least three motion pictures. In this case, “zing” was supposed to be the sound made by a plucked string. There are over twenty songs whose titles begin with “Hey,” which is simply an attention-getter and has no dictionary meaning at all. Another term which I, at least, had long assumed to be standard English, is “holistic,” meaning something unitary or with meshing parts, but none of my dictionaries give it, nor does Fowler.“ Zing” and “hey” are homemade words.
One of the richest fields for neologisms is sport. In baseball there are “opener,” “sweep,” “ball-hawk,” “hit his spots,” and dozens more. Many of these have been brought into wider use, for example “out in left field,” “pitch an idea,” “have a hit,” but once again, these are metaphorical usages. From other sports we get “wide-out,” “jumper,” “corner,” “gamer,” and scores more which any sports fan can summon up.
Drinkers, too, have their specialized vocabulary, which comes to almost four pages in my thesaurus. Terms for alcoholic drinks include “booze,” “hooch,” “brew” “grog’” “sauce,” “tipple,” “spirits,” and many more. Drinkers include “tippler,” “boozer,” “lush,” “soak,” “souse,” “sot,” “soaker,” and more. Drinking places are called “bar,” “tavern,” “pub,” “saloon,” “café,” “bistro,” “rathskeller”—the list goes on and on.
From various card games we draw “I’ll pass on that,” “She trumped my plan,” ”That’s aces,” “I’ll stand pat,” which possibly came from the custom of simply tapping the edge of the cards in your hand on the table to indicate you want no new cards. “Grand slam” was originally a bridge term, but is now standard for a home run with the bases loaded. “Frisk” has its traditional meaning of “to frolic,” or “to romp,” but it is today more commonly used to mean “to body search” for a weapon or other device.
True neologisms abound in art, among them “Dada,” “daub,” “Impressionism,” “sketch,” “doodle,” and many more, like ‘scumble,’ which may or not have derived from scum. Even richer is the terrain of sex. My thesaurus lists some thousand words relating to sex, a good many of which, like “zoophiliac” and “gynandrism” I’ve never heard of before. Many, if not most, of these terms cannot be used in a periodical which children might come across, but just to mention a few of the less prurient, there’s “mating,” “coition,” “congress,” “rutting”—I’m sure readers can add to the list. Then there are a number of words for the sex act which were invented for use in the more timorous media. One talk show merry-andrew devised the word “yackahoola” for this purpose. Others are “bedded,” “involved,” “keeping company.”
The military has produced far more neologisms than I can cite here, usually invented by imaginative soldiers looking for ways to deride the army and anything to do with it. In any case the ones I learned during my stint in the army undoubtedly are out of date. But some are still in use. In fact, I own a Jeep, a word derived from its formal cognomen, “General Purpose Vehicle,” which quickly became “G.P.” and then “Jeep.” When I was serving under I think it was General Washington, we were forbidden to use the term “gun” for a weapon. The word was “rifle” or “carbine” depending. The sergeant used to recite to us “This is my rifle, this is my gun; one is for fighting, one is for fun.” “Recruit” was twisted into “rookie,” now widely used in baseball. Why the lowest level enlisted man is called a “buck” private I don’t know. The Random House says it may come from the term “buck,” meaning young man. It may also have been because in an earlier day new enlisted men were paid thirty dollars a month, or a buck a day, but this is all speculative. More recently the term “grunts” has been used for the common soldiers. “Doughboy,” a word which was widely used in World War I, apparently comes from a kind of biscuit issued to soldiers as far back as the 18th century. “Colonel,” generally the chief of an army regiment, seems to have been derived from “column.” During World War II ordinary soldiers were often called “doggies,” or more politely by the media, “G.I. Joes”—G.I. standing for the formal term, “government issue.” The ordinary uniform in daily use is still called “fatigues” apparently from “fatigue duty”—manual labor.
The West of myth and legend employed a host of new terms: cowboy, lasso, shooting iron, rustler, cowpuncher, and six-shooter are just a few. “Lynch,” today meaning to hang somebody without the nuisance of a trial, commemorates the eighteenth century Judge Charles Lynch, who apparently enjoyed punishing miscreants. It originally meant any kind of physical punishment, such as whipping or stoning.
There is, in fact, almost no end to the homemade words invented by groups of all sorts for use among their members. In Europe, and some other places, bodies of academics decide which neologisms will be allowed in. L’Academie Française is notoriously conservative, often holding out against neologism long after they have come into common use. In England the great universities, like Oxford and Cambridge, try to hold a line, but journalists, who need short, succinct words understood by a mass audience, tend to ignore their strictures.
The United States has no formal institution charged with controlling usage. It is a free-for-all—my Random House gives no earliest use of “free-for-all,” and the O.E.D. doesn’t give it at all, suggesting that it is an American invention. Here we let the people decide. In the end, some words that begin as slang, like “poon,” will quickly disappear: others, like Jeep, will survive to have long lives. It is the people’s choice.
