Neologisms

Neologisms

#2 - While talking with a friend earlier today I mentioned what we were doing in class and what we were making lists of, he suggested the word "obomination", which I hadn't heard before, but it was pretty easy for me to see the blending of "Obama" and "abomination". Clearly not a word created by supporters of Obama. I googled the word to see what I could find on it and was directed to urbandictionary.com, which stated it is indeed a combination of these words, given to Obama by people who do not agree with his positions.

#3 & 4 - I was reading the magazine "Kiplinger's Personal Finance" and came to the article "Bargain Stalker - Once she tracks down a deal, she's ready to pounce." The article begins, "Some people are bargain hunters. Lee Jordan is a bargain stalker." I believe bargain hunter has been around for a while, but I'm not sure how long so I stuck it in here. It gives the picture of someone searching for a good deal. Someone who knows where good places to find deals are and goes to those places in search of them, as a hunter knows where to go to hunt certain game. Bargain stalker takes it a step further and gives a picture of the seriousness of it. She knows where and when sales occur and make sure she's where she needs to be at the right time of the sale, she'll stay there as a stalker would, and will follow sales wherever they go. She knows right where to find them.

My brother directed me to the Oxford English Dictionary website where I was able to look at the June 2009 release of new words, here are a few I found interesting

#5 -

turducken n.

A coming together of three words and of three birds. As a blend of the nouns duck and chicken are affixed to the first part of the word turkey, so a boned chicken is used to stuff a boned duck, which is in turn used to stuff a partially boned turkey. The result, in both cases, might equally be regarded as inventive, elegant, and appetizing, or as an ungainly way of overdoing things somewhat.

#6 -

car-booter n.

Although arguably a perfectly transparent compound (at least to a British person), this is a nice demonstration of the ways in which a logically formed word can appear baffling to someone who does not share the cultural background from which it comes. A person who kicks cars? Or (at a stretch) starts them, as one would boot a computer? Without prior knowledge of the existence of car-boot sales (and indeed that the rear storage compartment on a British car is a ‘boot’ not a ‘trunk’), one might not guess that this is simply a word for a person who attends them.

#7 - (one we are very familiar with)

bailout n.2

Bailouts of banks and other institutions have been prominent in the news recently, but the word has a long history, dating back to 1939. Although a more general sense exists, meaning a rescue of any kind, from the very start the context was financial; our first quotation comes from an article in Time discussing arrangements for a payment of $40,000,000 earmarked to help the tobacco industry (perhaps less likely to be the recipient of a bailout today), after a bad crop. Although the derivation of the noun bailout is straightforward, from the phrasal verb to bail out (also included in this release), the metaphor underlying this is unclear; whether the idea is that money is provided to ‘get someone out of jail’, or that metaphorical water is being bailed out of a ‘sinking ship’. It is possible that two originally distinct idioms have merged to create this sense.