http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/comedy/features/alex-horne–how-to-invent-a-word-1900477.html

Image sourced from: http://www.celebritybusinessspeakers.com/speaker-catalogue/alex-horne/

Alex Horne (2010) set himself a goal of 4 years to get a word or words in the dictionary. “I am going to scatter a handful of verbal seeds into the language. These will be new, original, freshly coined words or phrases which, over the next 1,000 days, I am going to water and watch to see if they can flower and thrive.” He knew that for these words to work he needed some help in getting them circulated and to monitor its growth. As Horne (2010) soon found this task is not as easy as it make sound or look! “…dictionary editors require substantial evidence that that word has been used by people from all walks of life for several years before even considering accepting it.” The obvious advantage Alex Horne had in this task, which I myself do not is he has connections and connections in the right places and of substantial influence and of course being a comedian himself he too had is career as an advantage. “I have been able to spout my words from countless stages across this country, scrawl them in the guestbooks of every guesthouse I’ve stayed in, and implant them in ever motorway service station I’ve passed through. I’ve also brandished them on banners at major sporting events, branded them onto mugs, T-shirts and umbrellas and casually dropped them into countless local radio phone-ins. I’ve infiltrated several schools and (mis)educated credulous schoolchildren, I’ve confused friends, family and many many strangers, I’ve even managed to infiltrate the holy grail of mass communication, television, infecting such varied shows as Daily Politics, Loose Women and Channel 4’s mighty Countdown.”

As Alex was my first find in the beginnings of this study I thought, though ambitious, it was worth trying to get in touch with him considering my project was very similar to his. After several obsessive tweets I surprisingly get a response and he followed me and direct message me his personal email…result! So the collaboration begun!

I wrote him a long email explaining my project and after a long wait and another email to request a response I eventually got the communication going on 2nd December 2013. He responded really well to my project, “…your masters sounds great. Good work! Right up my street.” And he continued on to explain his mission.

“I started my sort of similar project way back in 2005 and gave myself 1000 days to get a word in the dictionary. Unfortunately I failed (although I did get the slang word Honk (meaning cash – according to us) into an American book of British slang!”

As slight disappointed prevailed upon reading this, to think a well-known comedian had no success what chance does this give me! He continues to explain more positively the process he went to to try and achieve his goal:

“…fortunately, it was a lot of fun trying – although very time-consuming. I had various approaches – 1) just using the words amongst friends; which actually had the most long-term effect of some of them still being ‘alive’ today. 2) slipping them into bits and pieces on the internet, radio and telly; which did nothing to make them ‘real’ words but did give me lots of evidence to then send to the dictionaries as part of a corpus. 3) writing a show, book and various articles about the process itself; this also got the words out there and even though it wasn’t what I was hoping to do – mine was meant to be a secret project, implanting words in the language without telling other people what I was doing – it did mean more people got on board with the project. I still get messages from people saying they’ve seen or heard someone using a word I made up. Which is nice.”

It was interesting to hear him say that he had the most long term success amongst friends, guess fame doesn’t necessarily help. He clearly was more easily able to slot them in to radio and telly appearances as he did them. All this gave him lots of evidence to send off to the dictionaries. But with all that evidence and he still failed made me wonder what was missing! He also was able to get the word published, something I know is a requirement for any sort of consideration of submission of the word – again another advantage Horne has!

After the Christmas break and lots of work in constructing the words (see ‘The Words!’ post) I felt I was in a good place to get back in touch with Alex and to ask for his help in getting the words used! I couple of days later 20th January 2014 I got a response:

“Well done! And I can definitely try to use a word somewhere…”

So I responded with the list of words and their definitions (see ‘The Words!’ post) and was delighted to receive a very positive response back.

“…yes! I like! Excellent work – they feel v.well researched and properly planned – unlike my slapdash efforts!”

He seemed like he genuine in that he would use them and that he would let me know if he manages to get them “…in an interview or the like” but I was disappointed to hear that he had nothing in the immediate future. What bad timing!

I left it a bit then as I felt he was being honest and there was no need to bother him continuously. But a couple of weeks later I thought it was worth catching up to see if anything had progressed. It hadn’t but he sounded positive for the future however his plans were beyond the timelines of this project:

“…what I need is a tv or radio appearance and I just don’t have any coming up. I tend to do a load of publicity in the run up to Edinburgh but that’s not till june/july. I’ll keep looking for an opportunity though and will let you know if I succeed.”

Guess we shall just have to wait, but if it gets used after the project so be it…at least its being used!

With the word Quiz it came down to a Dublin theatre proprietor Richard Daley who decided to take what was thought to be a nonsensical and allow the public creates its meaning in 1875. “After a performance one evening, he gave his staff cards with the word ‘quiz’ written on them, and told them to write the word on walls around the city.” Following this it soon became the talk of the town and soon became everyday language. Little did he realise that this word had already been in existence, “The word, however, was already in use by then, meaning ‘an odd or eccentric person’, and had been used in this sense by Fanny Burney in her diary entry for 24 June 1782.” But it had also been used very shortly after this recording in 1790 and was known differently “…as a name for a kind of toy, something like a yo-yo.”

Despite all this the recording was hazy and therefore its later meaning ‘to question or interrogate’ came to be. Which shows its development in to becoming a type of test or questioning a persons intelligence and knowledge.

This brought rise to the word ‘wireless’ which I discuss later within Lexical Change.

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What is the origin of the word ‘Quiz’? http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/words/what-is-the-origin-of-the-word-quiz

I was keen to create a small post in this area to show that I have taken some time to understand what the requirements are for word submissions in to the Oxford English Dictionary.

Many times I get asked why the Oxford English Dictionary so specifically. That is simple, and as stated on their site, “Oxford leads the field in recording the entry of today’s new words into the language.”

Understanding what is needed to get words in the dictionary is key to this project. And despite this not going to be reached in the timescales for the module I want to ensure I maintain the criteria in mind at all times.

Firstly it is required for the words to be seen published and this can be in “…magazines, newspapers, books, song lyrics, practical manuals – indeed from any published source.” It is also interesting to find that they too consider slang and dialect words.

They also consider new usages of words so be this change of meaning or slight alteration of how and where this word is used. In addition they consider new pronunciation and even spellings! The world is our oyster here!

Their submission process takes place online and then access to draft or revise entry. Interesting it seems unclear to whether it goes in the dictionary or just sits in their records!

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Bibliography

Contribute to the OED. http://public.oed.com/the-oed-today/contribute-to-the-oed/

I pulled together a drafted email, well worded of course, that I could send out to contacts I find in the relevant fields. This email consisted of a breakdown of my project, my planned approach and how they could help me.

My first successful response came from Professor John Coleman, director at the Oxford University Phonetics Laboratory (17th November 2013) who pointed me immediately to the origin of the word Quiz (also see Origin of the word Quiz post). He did however highlight that not being a student of Oxford University his priorities lie with them first though “…I am happy to help it can only be in a small way and as time and other demands permit. But keep me posted on your work and if there are questions I can help with, just ask.”

He also kindly pointed me in the direction of Dr Philip Durkin, Principal Etymologist, Oxford English Dictionary, to understand the criteria of submission of words in to the Oxford English Dictionary. Unfortunately despite sending a couple of emails I have yet had a response.

I too tried to get in touch with Professor Aditi Lahiri, Professor of Linguistics and Fellow of Somerville College (19th November 2013), one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford. Unfortunately I received a response from her PA “We cannot give assistance to students who are studying for a Master’s degree in another university without a formal link with that university.”

I also got in touch with the Oxford University English Faculty Office (22nd November 2013) who responded to say they could not find anyone in the English Faculty who would be able to assist me. They pointed me to the Linguistics faculty whom I had already been in touch with but with no success.

I also approached LinkedIn with the hope to connect with the relevant people and follow up with an email to request some assistance. I got many accepted connections however only received one response from my follow up email which was from Viktor Pekar, currently Research Scientist at University of Birmingham, but who in the past has been an Independent Consultant and Language Data Engineer for the Oxford University Press. He responded really positively and as you shall see in my separate post, Collaboration with Viktor Pekar, proved to be extremely helpful in providing and sharing with me unknown knowledge!

“Thank you, this sounds like an interesting project. I am happy to provide consultations on linguistics in general, and on influence and change of the language on social media.”

Interestingly he too requested my assistance on some web work so all round collaboration!

I emailed him over details of my findings so far and how I planned to structure and go about this project. He responded really prompted with initial pointers recommending that I should focus on a branch of linguistics called sociolinguistics and provided me with a link to wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociolinguistics. On reading this it immediately opened up my thinking in to how we interact with each other through social media. I have created a separate post in this and it can be found at Sociolinguistics.

He continued on to suggest to take a look at “…a particular problem in sociolinguistics, called language change” and he shared a wikipedia link to get me started on this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_change. This area focuses on how language differs and changes throughout time and from place to place with change in society and change in dialect. It also discusses how language changes with new inventions. I continue to discuss this further in Language Change – Lexical Change. In conjunction to this he also highlights that Lexical Change in particular would be an area to focus on. This too is discuss in the post Language Change – Lexical Change.

To continue with the wealth of knowledge he is sharing with me he also mentions social network anaylsis and influencer analysis. Both looking in to the behaviours within the environment of social networking sites and the influencer within such scenarios both which are areas of great interest and relevance in this project. I take a look at these further within the post Social Network and Influencer Analysis.

And if that is not enough he highlights that he may be able to be of some assistance with regards to understanding the criteria for word submissions “…I have worked at Oxford University Press, the publisher of OED, and I could describe the general process of how new words are included into a new edition of the dictionary – unless you want to talk to actual editors.”

In a later email he continues to discuss the process of including new words into a dictionary. “OUP maintains “Oxford English Corpus”, a collection of texts representing the modern English language. You can read more about it here: http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/words/the-oxford-english-corpus . The corpus is collected from the web from selected sources (popular newspaper websites, scientific publications, etc, including social media sites) in order to represent all the different genres of the language currently in use. The corpus is regularly monitored for the occurrence of new words and expressions. If a certain word starts to be used significantly more often in recent times, then editors of the dictionary include them into a list of potential additions, revise it and make the eventual decision as to which new words will be included in the next edition of the dictionary.”