What is a word? I recently became involved in a discussion among several individuals from varying backgrounds who are enrolled in college writing classes, concerning whether certain constructions, rejected by their instructors, were or were not words. The two specific examples given were the commonly-used but grammatically questionable “irregardless” and “sacricity,” which the student had coined.
I responded by saying that both terms qualified as words, since they had been written down, had the form of words, and were intelligible. “Irregardless” is still regarded as substandard in formal writing, because of the double negative, but it has a subtly different coloring from the technically synonymous word “regardless”, and the writer made a deliberate choice to use it in a satiric piece. I think the instructor revealed a lack of understanding of the writer’s art when he red-penciled it. He is also, apparently, behind the times, because neither the grammar nor the spell-checker on my computer objects to “irregardless”.
The coined word poses more problems for me. The student stated: “I used the word sacricity the other day to explain a degree of sacredness in school…. my teacher told me it wasn’t a word….. I told him of course it was – I just used it!” Sacricity would therefore appear to be a synonym of sacredness, and since there is no prior record of use of the word, there is no way of judging what degree was intended.
Surely, among the 615,100 words in the current edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, there is a word that expresses, with a reasonable degree of precision, what the author was trying to express. Given the context, I expect the writer does not consider what he is encountering in school to be sacred at all, and sanctimoniousness (false or superficial adherence to the forms of piety) was what he had in mind.
Using an existing word properly creates an automatic connection with other written material on the same subject. In the digital age, that connection, to recent material at least, is easily accessed. A Google search under sanctimoniousness turned up many hits, mostly definitions but a number of articles treating the topic, such as “Morality vs. Sanctimoniousness” by Thomas Sowell. There were a surprising number of hits under “sacricity” as well. In a few, the writer seems to have meant sacristy. The others were blog posts in which sacredness or sanctity was apparently intended, as in “the sacricity of marriage.” In all of these cases the lack of appropriate vocabulary and the substitution of a coined word with no precise agreed-upon meaning diminished the effectiveness of the post as a communication tool.
In the case of coined words in academic and professional papers, the intent may actually be to decrease the effectiveness of communication outside a narrow discipline, in order to reinforce the impression that the discipline possesses unique knowledge and capabilities. Unfortunately this creates an atmosphere in which cross-disciplinary cooperation is difficult and there is much duplication of effort.
Internet thesauri can supply lists of synonyms and definitions, but for building a broad working vocabulary, there is really no substitute for reading widely, from authors who are effective wordsmiths in a variety of genres and disciplines. Since the increasing fragmentation and employment of specialized vocabulary in technical discourse on the one hand, and the simplification, both in vocabulary and grammar, of texts aimed at the average reader on the other, is something that has increased exponentially since the Second World War, including some proportion of older literature can be very helpful.
Image Credit
“St. Cuthbert Gospel” Wikipedia
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Interesting article. Along these lines I have observed a certain eagerness among some to trot out their personally coined words. Whether this is laziness, ignorance, creativity or simply an effort to see their creations’ use multiplied and eventually accepted is anyone’s guess.