Here's a post I wish I'd known about sooner.

[conuly]

Linking to it, after all, sure beats typing up my own new response every time that inane little comment comes up in conversation. Not a word, my foot! Squippidreen is not a word (presumably), but orientate or - as I've seen somebody say - gotten most definitely are. (And it's hardly our fault in the US that you people over the ocean have forgotten how to talk with regards to get, got, gotten! :P)

Comments

[mc776]

Squippidreen is clearly a word, just one that I don't know the meaning of (and if you've just coined it and not given it any meaning, then merely a word that has not had a meaning attached to it)!

[conuly]

Can you have a word without a meaning? What is this, some kind of zen?

How about vlim, then, or mtar? (How about I stop cribbing from the LCK?)

[mc776]

They certainly don't sound like English words, as a matter of phonology, though I suppose they would be if they went into common use for whatever reason.

As for your actual question... I guess that depends on the relevant working definition of "word".

Wiki gives a definition that includes a meaning.

SIL however does not require a meaning, though the word must have some kind of grammatical value.

That said, going by the SIL definition I may still have jumped the gun with my original reply, as you never said "there's no such thing as a squippidreen" or "you can't squippidreen anything" or "nothing can be said to be squippidreen", so no grammatical role had been defined for it at the time of your coinage.

But then I did unconsciously instantly parsed it as a noun at the time, and as such the word-form registered as a word for me... at which point I submit it became a word. :D

(Now if you just took the word-form from somewhere else that could change things significantly...)

[steorra]

I wonder if you unconsciously parsed it as a noun because your mind was partly ignoring the use/mention distinction and it was the subject of the sentence.

Or if the form of the word biased you towards a noun... (smithereen, tureen...).

[mc776]

Or a noun bias generally... if I suddenly encountered the word without grammatical context a reaction of ~what's a ___?~ has a much higher chance of being blurted out than ~how do you ___?~ or ~how could something be ___?~ so the former seems to be the unmarked default.

[janewilliams20.livejournal.com]

"Orientate" is most definitely a word. The alternative that seems to be being proposed, "orient", has a totally different meaning.
"Gotten" is a word in the American dialect of English, obselete elsewhere.
"Squippidreen", when Googled, only gets me to this post, so I suspect it isn't a commonly used word :)

But, somewhere down in the comments, someone's suggesting that "decimate" doesn't have to mean "destroy one in ten", it can just mean "destroy a high proportion of". WRONG. It's got "deci-" as part of the word - how could it possibly mean anything that ISN'T to do with "ten" in some way or other? It might conceivably slide into "one in ten survive", if you completely ignore all the other associations that go with it (legions, being forced to kill your own comrades as punishment, etc etc), but it'sTEN. Not nine, not eight, not "some", or "a lot". Ten. Deci. That's how the logic of languages works, just as "deci-pedal" would mean "has ten feet".

[conuly]

You're wrong. The logic of language is that if people use a word with a certain meaning, and everybody comprehends that meaning (even if they don't like it), then that's what the word means. Since most people use "decimate" to mean "destroy a high percentage of", that's a meaning of that word, no matter what "deci-" means or what the word meant historically. Saying "Well, it has deci- in that, and that has to mean ten something or other" is committing a fallacy, specifically the fallacy of etymology. Word origins are fascinating, but they don't really mean anything. If they did, I might as well say that every lady has to make bread because there's a loaf in the word.

[janewilliams20.livejournal.com]

Oh? So if someone uses "four-footed" to mean "has a lot of feet but no specific number", you wouldn't think they're an idiot? It's exactly the same thing. If you don't mean a specific number, why are you saying a specific number?

[conuly]

Because deci isn't an English word. It's often an English prefix, yes - but it's not a word in English and, as decimate proves, not all words with deci in them have anything to do with the number ten.

Calculate has to do with the ancient practice of doing math by moving rocks around. You still see the same root in words like calcify and in the OTHER use of the word calculate, a rocky material accidentally formed in the body. Does this mean that people who use "calculate" to mean "doing math in my head with no aids" are wrong because they don't even think people might move pebbles to do math?

Teachers are called pedagogues, even though the etymology of the word is not "teacher" but "that slave who brings children to school". Do we hold fast to THAT etymology, even though nobody uses that word in this way anymore?

Language changes. People do not hear the word 'decimate' and carefully analyze it as "okay, ten something or other". That's not how anybody learns to speak. They use the meaning other people use - which by and large is now "destroy near-totally". To say that they should, THAT is what goes against the logic of language.

If it weren't for that, there would essentially BE no word decimate anymore, because honestly, how often does it come up that something kills exactly 1 out of 10?

[conuly]

And if we had a word "four-footed" that was often used for animals with no specific number of feet, I wouldn't really question it. At the moment, we don't have such a word. Both four-footed and quadruped are generally used for animals with specifically four feet.

However, neither "centipede" nor "millipede" have to do with animals with exactly 100 or 1000 feet, respectively. Neither of those animals has those many legs. Am I an idiot for referring to those animals by their common names instead of their various, hopefully more accurate, scientific names? After all, there's a centi- in it! And a milli-! Perhaps the animals are the stupid ones, having the wrong numbers of legs. A mile is no longer 1000 anything either, certainly not 1000 paces. And I know, the rest of the world uses the metric system, but here in the US we still have feet and miles. Feet are rarely 12 inches as well, but now we're moving quite out of the scope of numbers.

[conuly]

Or, for that matter, look at bicycles. That's fairly transparent, two wheels, but if I add some training wheels I don't change the name and insist that everybody should call it a "quadricycle" until I learn to stop falling over. Actually, I would usually call it a bike, but there's still a bi- in it. If I have a baker's dozen of something, it's not because bakers can't count, nor because dozen is a meaningless word. Colleges and nice private schools in the US often have a "quad", an open grassy area, but it does not have to have exactly four sides, and yet nobody is confused about what the area is.

[ksol1460.livejournal.com]

One of our pet peeves is the use of nouns as verbs (http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/story?id=131176&page=1#.UGxya67ps6U). Particularly "journaling" for writing in a journal. Or "Do you journal?" Our instinctive reaction is, "journal" is not a verb. It feels like saying "Do you car?" for driving. We thought it was a Nude Age trendy neologism from the self-awareness movement (as opposed to actual self-awareness).

Or so we THOUGHT. Earlier this year we opened Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, written in 1817, where there are two characters exchanging humorous rants about diaries -- and one of them used the word "journaling".

Andy says he doesn't care, Jane Austen is not Holy Writ and it still isn't a word. If someone who was intimately familiar with English and knew what they were doing said "journaling", that would be different. Tolkien, for instance.

[conuly]

You entirely missed the point of the link, didn't you? Words are words even if some people don't like them. You can't banish words just because you choose not to use them.

[ksol1460.livejournal.com]

Yes, we did. We completely read it wrong. Too tired and not enough coffee. Apologies.

[conuly]

I also apologize, for being in a completely bitchy mood.

[ksol1460.livejournal.com]

Apology accepted on behalf of all and sundry. I feel I have been a bitch this week also. I shall strive to de-bitchify myself, and if that's not a word, it should be.

[marveen.livejournal.com]

Re conuly's previous comment, I thought this was a sidebar, not the Main Point.

Re ksol's point, nouns-as-verbs are not that rare. You can bike on your bike, knife someone with your knife, and hoof it down the road before you log the action in a log. You note with a noter, comb your hair with your comb, and if that doesn't get the job done you brush it with your brush (perhaps while carding). I'm sure we can trace back and determine which ones are verbs-that-gave-the-item-its-name and which are items-which-gave-the-name-to-the-action, but does it matter?

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

A word is a noun when it indicates a 'being', a verb when it indicates a 'doing'. Noun and verb are not always fixed categories, so that a word 'is' one or the other - sometimes they're just labels for the function a word is performing in a particular sentence.

I don't think there's anything ungrammatical about saying "journaling". I just think it sounds absurdly pretentious - on a par with the word 'authored' - what the heck is wrong with the old-fashioned verb 'to write'? Not even getting into the potential quibble about it not being 'writing' if it's typing instead of handwriting: the original device was called a typewriter because typing is one form of writing, not a separate activity.

For people who want language to be logical and exact, there is Esperanto. Languages that grew naturally rather than being artificially designed are not logical and exact, because people are not. It doesn't really matter who says that 'ain't' or 'quiz' or 'okay' or 'hoodlum' are not real words. It doesn't matter how often one argues that 'enormity' is not a synonym for 'immensity', dammit. Usage marches on, and them what gets in its way gets marched right over.