In the first episode of my new podcast, Behind the Grammar, JC Hutchins coins a neologism (“vlurb”), reveals what JC stands for, and talks about how he wrote Personal Effect: Dark Art in two months and made his amazing video trailers.
JCHutchins.net/trailers
I asked my Twitter friends whether I should upgrade my iPhone to the new version with video or buy a Flip camera. Here are the responses. (I used http://twickie.pirillo.com/ to compile the responses and it didn’t seem to grab all of them. It seems to fetch replies to a specific post, so maybe the people it didn’t catch didn’t reply to my original question. I’m not sure, but I didn’t intentionally exclude anyone.)
The responses seem mixed. Since the iPhone isn’t available yet, people are mostly speculating about it. Most people seem to love their Flip cameras, but one person warned me that I may not be happy with the audio, which is a big concern for me.
In the book Personal Effects: Dark Arts by JC Hutchins (@jchutchins), a guy makes up words hoping people will use them (for example, he makes up the word “foolbiscuit” to mean idiot). My favorite pop-culture instance of this is the character in the movie “Mean Girls” who keeps trying to get everyone to use the word “fetch” to mean “cool.” I wondered if there was a name for that behavior, and sent the question out to my Twitter friends.
I got a lot of great recommendations, which I’ve compiled below. Thanks, everyone! (And I apologize if I’ve missed any. I think I got them all.)
Suggested names for words made up with the hope that others will use them.
GrantBarrett@Fritinancy @grammargirl I don’t have a verb, but new words that are spread by an organized campaign are called “factitious.”
RogueReverend@GrammarGirl Somebody used “Sniglets.” Can’t remember who, but I heard it a long time ago.
robcrogers3@GrammarGirl Call them maladoptisms?
CathleenRitt@GrammarGirl Protologism is a new word created in the hope that it will become accepted. Protologism was coined by Mikhail Epstein in 2003
Fritinancy@GrammarGirl Barbara Wallraff calls them Word Fugitives. I’ve also seen “sniglet.” http://tinyurl.com/yg66md
KeriStevens@GrammarGirl Thank you! Unfortunately, got nothing for you re: pushed neologisms. Egologisms?
Suggested names for people who make up words with the hope that others will use them.
picnicking@GrammarGirl, someone that likes/needs/wants to coin new words for general use? How about ,” popcoiner?”
Grizzlysgrowls@GrammarGirl Egologistics?
dhersam@GrammarGirl neologist wouldn’t work? 🙂 maybe more along the lines of coiner, self-promoter?
ebilflindas@GrammarGirl Neoligist?
walterhanig@GrammarGirl “everbgelist”
karma_musings.@GrammarGirl Maybe… foolbiscuit??? 🙂
mr_steve23@GrammarGirl Vocabulator – one who contributes to the growth of a communal lexicon.
Suggested words for the act of making up new words in the hope that others will use them.
mr_steve23@GrammarGirl Vocabulation – the act of adding new words to a communal lexicon.
parkview@GrammarGirl “neologestation” I does take awhile, after all.
sasmus@GrammarGirl Neoligistics, neoligizing.
CaliEditor@GrammarGirl Why not “neologizing?”
reiheit@GrammarGirl “neologising”. I guess that’s the British spelling, American would be “neologizing”
ScottQuitter@GrammarGirl How about Shakespearing?
aparentlee@GrammarGirl How about “webstering” to describe the practice of adopting or designing new language?
DCRealtorRicki@GrammarGirl bonmoting? moting? creamoting (create + mot)?
BrazilLit@GrammarGirl do you mean “word coining” ?
Fritinancy@GrammarGirl Maybe @GrantBarrett can help you out. (I’d say “sniggling.”)
cswriter@GrammarGirl Lexiculture?
lbgilbert@GrammarGirl The behavior? How about “shameless self-promotion”? 😉
CathleenRitt@GrammarGirl What about “Neologging” (as in flogging a neologism”)
Ainamarth120@GrammarGirl neologising?
leprecoceferoce@GrammarGirl Protologising? From Wikipedia: A protologism is a new word created in the hope that it will become accepted.
WesleyC@GrammarGirl: I like ‘egologisms’ so how about use that as a base? Egologising?
earbox@grammargirl I’d say “liffing” (after The Meaning of Liff), but it sounds too close to “yiffing,” which has..unfortunate connotations.
KeriStevens@GrammarGirl evangelogizing. Yes.
mlv@GrammarGirl neologomania?
oliveshoot@GrammarGirl presumptuousness
RoseZag@GrammarGirl Yes, there is! It falls under a type of ld/autism/speech and language. Sorry, I can’t remember the name!
Finally here are a few interesting related comments.
DeepEddy@GrammarGirl there was an episode of The Sarah Silverman Show about this. I don’t remember if they gave it a name there or not.
averagebetty@GrammarGirl Whatever you call it, it’s the behavior of a toddler. A crafty toddler can have adults calling blankets “binkies” in no time.
MajorBedhead@GrammarGirl Surely there’s a name for that already. Wasn’t that done in A Clockwork Orange?
[And finally, my favorite comment] pianoeditor@GrammarGirl If there isn’t a name for that, you could make one up, hoping people will use it.
With summer coming up, my husband and I were talking about important lessons we learned in college, and what we wish someone would have told us when we were younger.
Here’s my top lesson: Forget about making money during the summer and get a meaningful internship.
I see too many parents who can afford the tuition encouraging their kids to get a summer job to pay for part of the college expense. I believe most of those parents think they are doing their kids a favor by helping them understand the value of money and work, and letting their kids feel as if they are contributing to their education. But the few thousand dollars that child will make working at a fast-food joint or a retail job aren’t worth the lost opportunity of not doing an internship.
College is about getting experience, and in my opinion, the kind of experience that will help you get your dream job when you’re done. There’s no better way to get experience and make contacts than to do an internship in a field in which you want to eventually work.
And for heaven’s sake don’t be clueless like I was! I wanted to be a journalist and worked for a summer at the the local daily newspaper, but nobody talked to me about networking, building contacts, and keeping in touch with those contacts. I came away with some good experience (and the job even paid), but I still had no idea how to get a foot in the door on the writing side. A few simple lunches with discussions about freelancing would have been a good idea. Keeping in touch with people so that I had someone to contact two years later when I graduated would have been wise. But I didn’t do those things and ended up in a series of odd jobs (selling signs, working for an insurance broker) before I eventually went to graduate school.
As far as I know, your college years are the only time you’re “qualified” to do internships at fantastic companies. Don’t miss the opportunity.
I made a video episode for the Grammar Girl podcast this week, and it was quite an ordeal, which is why the show came out two days late. I learned a lot along the way, so I thought I’d share it with you here.
I’m posting the first less-than-adequate video I made (which was about the third take), and the final product (which was the fifth take, and which we shot and edited after getting some sage advice from Trent Armstrong–Modern Manners Guy, but more importantly for this story, video guy extraordinaire).
Find Trent Armstrong at these locations:
As an aside, if you care about the content of the videos (how to organize a book), you’ll learn slightly different things by watching both videos. I didn’t use a script so there are a few non-overlapping tidbits.
Both videos were filmed with a Canon GL2 camera.
Lights
We shot this one during the day, using one 500 watt halogen worklight pointed almost straight at me, a bright incandescent light hitting me from the side, and light from the windows hitting from the other side of the room. We turned on various other lamps throughout the room for good measure. Apparently the color of the electric lights doesn’t mix well with the blue light from the windows, and we had them positioned wrong.
Tripod & Mic
We shot without a tripod (which made the video shaky), and I pointed to things on the wall as the camera moved to them (which made the section slow and dizzying). I used an inexpensive wireless lapel mic.
Editing and Compressing
In editing, I covered up pauses or breaks with iMovie HD transitions, and “shared” the file with iMovie HD QuickTime settings. The final version looks 100x worse than what I saw in iMovie while I was editing. I was shocked by how pixelated it was. (The player here seems to be making it tiny instead of making it bigger and pixelated like QuickTime did when I just plugged the link into my browser.)
Lighting
Trent gave us great advice about how to deal with the lighting. We waited until dark to film so there wouldn’t be light from the windows, we positioned the lights a foot or two higher than my head, and we had the brighter light hitting me from the right at an angle (my right, as I was being filmed) and the bright incandescent light hitting me from the same angle on the left.
Trent also recommended that I stand farther from the wall to eliminate shadows.
Tripod and Mic
We shot with a tripod to make the film more steady. (Unfortunately, I was sitting on an exercise ball while we filmed and I’m bouncing a tiny bit, so it’s just unsteady in a different way. Next time I’ll use a real chair!)
I broke down and bought a better mic: a Shure PGX omnidirectional wireless lavalier mic. It sounds a lot better, but in my opinion, not as good as it should for how much I spent on the darn thing, so I’m going to take it back and try a cardoid mic.
Editing
I did a lot more with still shots to make the part go faster where I was pointing to things and having the camera follow me in the “bad” video.
I still did the main editing in iMovie HD because I know how to use it better, but I transferred the file to iMovie 08 so I could use a cropping technique Trent recommended to make the transitions look more professional.
Compression
I “shared” the video from iMovie 08 using QuickTime settings that would give me the biggest video possible, and then used a program Trent recommended called VisualHub (which is now only available as open source code) to compress the file down to 360 x 240. (Using a different compression program made a huge difference, perhaps the biggest difference of all the things I’ve mentioned.)
Compression took forever (OK, about 30 to 40 minutes each time), so make sure you are completely finished editing before you compress. I had a stray audio file at the end of my movie the first time I compressed, so that long wait was wasted and I had to do it again after 30 seconds of additional editing. Also, about half way through I realized that iMovie would work faster if I shut down all the programs I had running in the background that I wasn’t using but that were taking up processing power. Duh!
Delivery
When we first started, I had a really hard time remembering what I wanted to say. I posted an outline on the wall, but it was obvious I was glancing away at something. (I didn’t keep the early takes, so you won’t see this in the “bad” video.)
By the time we did the final take, it was much easier for me to remember the main points, but to me it feels as if I wasn’t as animated. I don’t think I smiled as much or talked with as much energy as in the earlier video. In fact, I think I look exhausted in the “good” video. I guess that’s what days of fighting with video will do to a girl!
Now that I have these great tips from Trent, I’m hoping it will be easier next time.
On the Grammar Girl website, I explain that the reason most publications capitalize “Internet” is that it’s the name of one specific thing or place, making it a proper noun.
Yesterday I was reading the New Scientist (May 2, 2009) and came across this incongruity: They have an article titled “Is there only one Internet?” (page 32), and their answer is “Probably–for now.” Yet their publication style is to lowercase “internet.” Go figure.
This is a video of an interview I did with Diana Pearce at KARE11 in Minneapolis on May 7, 2009. We discussed when to capitalize “mom” since Mother’s Day is coming soon, some pet peeves, and what people can do to improve their job applications.
I’m struggling to define the difference between style and voice in writing. I’m developing the idea that style is something like format (you can write with a technical style or a conversational style, for example), and voice is something inherent in your writing that is harder to define: it’s what makes your writing sound like you. But I still wasn’t happy with that explanation, so I threw the question out to my Twitter followers. As usual, they came up with some great insights:
What do you think? Add your comments below.
I’ll say it first: I’m a nerd. I got so excited about seeing an unusual sentence construction that I had to share it with you.
This wonderful capital letter in the middle of a sentence is perfectly correct; you just don’t see it too often. In case you can’t read the scanned image, the sentence reads “But for me as a critic and you as a viewer, the question is, Are there better shows on TV?”
I wrote about that kind of construction on the Grammar Girl blog. The funny thing is that I didn’t much care for it when I wrote about it, but I’m tickled pink to see it in print.
Thanks to Jamie Poniewozik for writing that odd sentence in his April 6, 2009, Time article, “Here’s to the Death of Broadcast.”
