When do words, become words?

Hyburnate said:
Excuse the really confusing title, but when does a word become an acceptable word?

Of course the English language is very old, and new 'slang' is found each and every day, but how does something become acceptable?

If you look into many words you find they first appeared in a book in year XXXX, so how do these days, words become words?

It's worth saying, I am fully sober I am just incredibly curious :)
Click to expand...
They simply become part of the "word hoard" as the anglo-saxons would have said, they become part of teh common venacular there have been attempts to gentrify spoken and written english to make speakers of what certain elites regard as unacceptable language but such snobbery is frowned upon today

Feek said:
Some words don't catch on. For example, anaspeptic, frasmotic and pericombobulation. Others do such as cromulent and embiggen.
Click to expand...
"Embiggen" only in a satirical way surely....

gingergundog said:
Stone the flamin' crows!
Click to expand...
Stone the crows is actually english just transported overseas and then back again I used to hear it from parents and grandparents hearing aussies say it was a surprise its also unknown in the US there was a tale that when american audiences watched Crocodile Dundee when they heard the phrase they looked up at the sky

BowdonUK said:
I think words become words when they are spoken with an understood meaning.

I've been watching some videos recently about the origin of some English words.

I recently discovered the Yorkshire phrase "Ey up" comes from Swedish "Sey upp", presumably from the Viking occupation of eastern England.
Click to expand...
Old Norse and northern england, in yorkshire dialect more than half the words are of norse origin and many ON words to describe northern landscapes passed into common english usage i.e. bleikrr, "bleak"
 
Last edited:
SexyGreyFox said:
Going back to the 90s I worked with a bloke who was weirder than me.
One day he said he was going to take a word and make it common place on the factory we worked at which had about 4,000 staff.
He chose the word 'Drongo' to use as a deragotary word because he'd seen the bird on a TV programme.
Within 6 months everybody was using it and even now when I'm talking to some of those old workers we'll use the word drongo when talking about certain people.
Click to expand...

Basically in my first full time job I worked on a team where everyone seemed to start every sentence with basically. Or if not used at the start, you can basically always slip it in somewhere. I must have picked up the habit because my mates started taking the urine out of me for saying basically all the time. However, in basically next to no time they were all doing it as well. So basically what I'm saying is...
 
Pawnless Endgame said:
4. Loanwords, mainly pinched from French. Cafe, restaurant, tariff, verify, premier (as in Premier League), and colours such as blanche, noir, rouge, brunette.
Click to expand...

We have 'loanwords' which are words adopted from a foreign language with little or no modification.

Then we have 'calques' which are English words/phrases that are a direct translation from their foreign origin.

Interestingly (in that computer forum nerd way) Loanword is a calque and Calque is a loanword :p
 

I think there are some rules about when a word can officially be entered into the dictionary - something like evidence of it being used it 3 different forms of media like newspaper, radio and err someone famous said it (like Simon Mayo and 'pants'. Maybe that's the radio again).
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom