William Shakespeare is known for many things, like being difficult to understand for high school students. He wrote some sonnets too. My favorite is #104. Also, he invented and popularized a lot of words including dishearten, frugal, and premeditated. That is according to nosweatshakespeare.com, which sounds like a biased source. I didn’t bother to delve deep and check those facts because the point is that Shakespeare invented many words and phrases that are still used 400 years later. That’s impressive.
Another prolific vocabulary man was Chick Hearn, broadcaster for the Los Angeles Lakers. He didn’t invent words, but he did “invent” terminology within the basketball context. He coined terms. When you shoot the ball and it doesn’t hit the hoop, it’s an air ball. Of course it’s an air ball. But Chick Hearn was the one who coined the term. When you jump up and force the ball through the rim, it’s a slam dunk. Of course it is. Again, Chick Hearn came up with the term. Even though the words “air,” “ball,” “slam,” and “dunk,” all existed, he helped develop the basketball lexicon.
In more recent years, new words have emerged, like “selfie,” and new meanings for words have developed. My favorite of the latter is “spam,” which is an inexpensive meat product. It was then featured in a skit by British comedy troupe Monty Python. After that, the word evolved into a new meaning: unwanted emails. It became such a real definition of the word that the major email service providers all include a “Spam” folder, not an “Unwanted” folder that we colloquially call “spam,” but the biggest tech companies in the world literally type “spam” into their code. Hilarious
Anyway, there’s another phenomenon where we want new words to exist. So we describe specific feelings or experiences, and then try to come up with a word for it. Here’s an example: there are books and films that I love. They’ve affected me in a profound way. I consider them to be very beautiful, which is a good thing, but there’s a twinge of sadness when you realize that I can no longer experience those things for the first time ever again. Other people have felt it, but what do we call it? I don’t know. Maybe someone can invent a word for it.
So I want to explain another feeling I get sometimes. It’s a feeling that I’ve never explained to anyone. It’s half a feeling and half just a thing I think about. When I think about myself, I think that I have two parents. They each had two parents, so I have four grandparents. And I have eight great-grandparents, sixteen great-great-grandparents, thirty-two great-great-great-grandparents, and so on. The number increases as we go back in time, multiplied by two with each successive generation. When I visualize this, it looks like this:
and so on.
But then I think about the population of planet Earth. It’s around 8 billion now, and in 2000 it was around 6 billion, and around 1.6 billion in 1900. When I visualize this, it looks like this:
and so on.
So they’re complete opposites. And that makes me feel really weird as I pointlessly try to visualize numbers of people as a function of time going into the past. It creates an annoying dissonance in my mind. It’s like a little itch in my brain that I can’t scratch. Am I supposed to visualize the past as a cone or a funnel? What word can express this feeling? How about chronodemodissonance? Do you think that’ll catch on?
Lefty Forrester 