When in doubt, make it up.

In this second installment of Mark v. GRE literature I thought it would be fun – it is Saturday after all – to take a look at the wondrous world of neologisms.

A neologism is simply a newly coined word or phrase. It can be a completely new word, a fragmentation of an existent word, or simply a new usage of an existent word. Some of the more famous neologisms are: laser, quark, genocide, blog, crock pot, aspirin, badonkadonk (its ok to laugh), scrooge, google, and hippopotomonstrosesquipedalian (ironically, this word means “pertaining to very long words”). One of the most unusual neologisms, thanks to Penguin’s Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, is verbocrap.

Verbocrap – an utterly useless word concerning my GRE studies – is basically when a stupid bureaucrat overdoes it in an attempt to sound intelligent. So many Bushisms (another popular neologism) fall into this category, but the example given in Penguin must take the cake. From an ILEA educational publication:

Due to increased verbalization the educationist desires to earnestly see school
populations achieve cognitive clarity, auracy, literacy and numeracy both within
and without the learning situation. However, the classroom situation (and the
locus of evaluation is the classroom) is fraught with so many innovative
concepts (e.g. the problem of locked confrontation between pupil and teacher)
that the teaching situation is, in the main, inhibitive to any meaningful
articulacy. It must now be fully realized that the secondary educational scene
has embraced the concept that literacy has to be imparted and acquired via
humanoid-to-humanoid dialogue. This is a break-through.

Verbose and crappy indeed. A more useful neologism seems to be the term nihilist. First appearing in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons (a book I own but have not read), nihilism refers to the radical stance that denies all traditional and moral values. Nihilism for Turgenev came from the deep disillusionment of the Russian intelligentsia from the lack of reform (thanks Penguin).

How interesting that this need to destroy all the old to actually get anything done is roughly analogous to the creation of a new word to accommodate a usage, a task for which all other language was incapable.