The Nutty World Of Words.

What nonsense has done to our vocabulary and what vocabulary has done to our nonsense.

Robert Cormack
6 min readApr 9, 2020

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Photo by Scott Webb on Unsplash

You have to be odd to be number one.” Dr. Seuss

Theodor Geisel (Dr. Seuss), author of 42 children’s books, didn’t like kids. As Geisel once confessed, “You have’m, I’ll amuse’m.” He created The Cat In the Hat because he found Dick and Jane boring. Oh, The Places You’ll Go was supposed to be read by expectant mothers.

He also coined the word “nerd” for his book If I Ran the Zoo.

“I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells,” Geisel once said, and he certainly believed in nonsense. Little did he know he’d be coining a term (nerd) for future tech billionaires everywhere.

In turn, they would invent their own odd words like “zap” and “pram,” while rendering words like “help” completely useless to the average computer user needing help.

Not only did Geisel create “nerd,” he also created “guff,” which went on to become “I don’t take no guff.” He prided himself on taking no guff from children, which he accomplished quite cleverly by not having any.

His wife admitted they scared the crap out of him. He didn’t do readings.

Possibly Carroll would have chortled and been snarky if someone had accused him of pedophilia.

Lewis Carroll liked children — possibly too much—according to some Carrollian scholars. He took nude pictures of Alice’s older sister, Lorina Liddell (then 13 years old). Perhaps writing Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was his way of straightening out a bit. Then again, going from a 13 to an 11-year-old wasn’t exactly a smart move if you’re trying to lay off kids.

Photography aside, Carroll still managed to come up with some pretty interesting words like “chortle” and “snark.” Possibly he would have chortled and been a snark if someone had accused him of pedophilia.

Chortle is actually a combination of “chuckle” and “snort,” what linguists call a “portmanteau.” This was invented by Lewis Carroll, too. He probably figured someone was going to take him to task over “slithy” which combines “slim” and “lithe.”

He went on to help form the “cyberpunk” movement when he ran out of hippy chicks.

Fans of Superman might be interested to know that the word itself wasn’t created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. Long before they developed their “caped crusader,” George Bernard Shaw coined the term for Man and Superman. He, in turn, stole it from Friedrich Nietzsche. Both men wore capes and Nietzsche thought he could fly.

William Gibson is credited with the term “cyberspace” which first appeared in his short story Burning Chrome. Gibson was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War. Moving to Toronto, he said that he wasn’t avoiding the draft so much as trying to “sleep with hippie chicks.” He went on to help form the “cyberpunk” movement after he ran out of hippy chicks.

So why are odd people responsible for so many words? Linguists believe it’s all part of the creative process. Once you step outside standard literary form, you might as well throw in a few new words (you’ve already turned off the scholars).

Anthony Burgess created a whole vocabulary for A Clockwork Orange. His characters were so weirdly violent, it seemed natural to give them weird names. Like Carroll, Burgess tended to use portmanteaus, such as “droog” which is a variation of the Russian “drug fiend.”

One day, he just blurted out “rock ‘n roll.” It stuck because nobody else knew what to call it. Sometimes words and terms happen when we’re stumped.

Sometimes it’s not even the author but the critic who creates the term. Columnist, Herb Caen, created “beatnik” to describe the writers of the Beat Generation. “It kind of just came out,” he admitted, noting this was around the time of Russia’s Sputnik satellite.

Disc jockey, Alan Freed, is credited with the term “rock and roll.” As he admitted, “I was on air playing guys like Elvis Presley. I didn’t know what he was doing. It sounded country but it also sounded R&B. One day, I just blurted out ‘rock ‘n roll.’” It stuck because nobody else knew what to call it. Sometimes words and terms happen when we’re stumped.

It’s the same with naming toys. Ruth Handler, the creator Barbie, wasn’t thinking of a name that best typified an anatomically perfect body (if you don’t mind small boobs and no hips). Barbie was the name of her daughter, so Ruth called the doll Barbie. Interestingly, a surprising number of Barbies with perfect bodies showed up in the centrefolds of Playboy.

Linguists also point out that new words can help describe advancements. Megawatt, for instance, refers to one million watts. Most of us wouldn’t know a million watts from a lightening bolt, so it’s called a megawatt, which clears things up for anyone hit by a lightening bolt, or a megawatt, or a millions watts (it’s a fuck of a lot of watts).

Joseph Heller had to invent “Catch-22” because there was no term for sending pilots on missions long after they were capable of flying. When they complained that they were “going mad,” military psychiatrists kept them in the air by saying, “You can’t be mad if you think you’re mad.”

Sometimes words appear simply out of expediency. Back when detective novels were popular, critics and columnists had to produce reviews. Not being terribly good wordsmiths, they relied on common descriptives. These were repeated ad nauseum until editors came out of their offices, screaming “Who wrote this crap?” which led to the crime descriptive “whodunit.”

Elon Musk said he was worried because he didn’t understand them, either. How do you make sense of “Balls have zero to me to me to me”?

If it takes the odd or nonsensical to create new words, this might explain why Facebook recently had to shut down their AI. It was creating its own language. More frightening than that, other AIs understood the bots. Since Facebook didn’t — and Mark Zuckerberg didn’t — they shut it down.

Elon Musk said he was worried because he didn’t understand them, either. How do you make sense of “Balls have zero to me to me to me”?

If Lewis Carroll was still around, he’d probably know exactly what it means. The rest of us simply don’t have the portmanteau — or the creatively odd minds — including Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. If they’re worried, maybe we should be, too…unless AIs are doing something far more nonsensical than we realize. Maybe they’re learning how to talk to kids.

Would it be so odd if they prefer creating Through the Looking-Glass instead of algorithms? Maybe AIs realize that nonsense is…well…a heck of a lot more fun.

Or maybe being odd is how you become number one. It worked for Dr. Seuss. It’s probably worked for lots of people, some known, some just cranks, all creating their own little worlds and language, waiting for the days when robots come by and commend them for their thinking.

Anything’s possible where nonsense is concerned. As long as letters form words, and words form sentences, someone’s going to invent a new word, possibly a portmanteau, but more likely just some mangily, butrification, like balls mean zero to me to me to me. It could catch on. You never know.

Robert Cormack is a satirist, novelist and blogger. His first novel “You Can Lead a Horse to Water (But You Can’t Make It Scuba Dive)” is available online and at most major bookstores. Check out Skyhorse Press or Simon and Schuster for more details.

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Robert Cormack

I did a poor imitation of Don Draper for 40 years before writing my first novel. I'm currently in the final stages of a children's book. Lucky me.