Revision:Neologisms and Society

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"Give examples of words and phrases which have developed over the last fifty years in one or more of the following areas: warfare, politics, technology. How and why have these words and phrases developed?"

▪ The question gives the option of only answering in reference to one of the developing areas, though in this context, it appears perfectly sensible to discuss each. Technology in itself is very simple to discuss (covering areas such as e-mail and text messaging), whilst examples may be found which link warfare and politics.

▪ Discussion of specific lexical change will form the majority of the essay. Most of the examples (e.g. affixing and compounding) will be relevant to each of the developing areas; the essay is best approached using a small selection of evaluated examples for each, in order that all of the major processes of lexical change are covered in the essay as a whole.

Affixing – this is the most common source of new words, whereby prefixes or suffixes are added to existing words. Technological advances have seen many of these words being formed, for example:

multi- is used in ‘multimedia’ and ‘multiplayer’ to mean more than one of an item or aspect

inter- refers most obviously to the internet. Semantic expansion has led to the use of ‘net’ and ‘web to refer to computer connections, and there are also individual instances such as ‘intranet’ (referring to an in-house style of network), which are semi-coinage and draw from several different areas.

Since the Watergate political scandal in the United States around 1970, -gate has become a suffix denoting scandal (e.g. ‘Irangate’).

The –ism suffix is used very frequently in politics to describe a particular ideology or, alternatively, a prejudice. It is often added to significant political names to demonstrate allegiance to the stances of others, e.g. the use of ‘Blairism’ began alongside the Iraq War.

Compounding – where words are combined to form a larger word or expression. In technology, ‘laptop’ is the most obvious example, and terms may also be separated by a hyphen or a space, as in ‘blue-ray’ or ‘floppy drive’. Blends are similar, but only involve parts of each word being joined together, e.g. ‘bit’ (binary and digit).

Politics, technology and warfare terminology have also brought about much lexical change in terms of shortening, for example:

Back formation - (often) nouns are shortened to leave a word of another type. The rise of technology and its application in the media and word processing has produced the verb to ‘edit’.

Acronyms – these are particularly memorable in politics and discussion of warfare. They are formed from the letters of existing words and pronounced as a word in their own right (this was never done before the twentieth century). Examples include NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) and WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) in software editing and document processing.

Initialisms – words are abbreviated and the letters are pronounced separately. A unique example is CD-ROM, where only the first part is spoken as an initialism and the second as an acronym.

Eponyms – products and services are named after their designers and fall into widespread use, for example, the Dyson vacuum cleaner.

▪ New words and expressions have developed because of the simple fact that they are required to cover new technological and political developments.