Neologism Quotes

My greatest concern was what to call it. I thought of calling it 'information,' but the word was overly used, so I decided to call it 'uncertainty.' When I discussed it with John von Neumann, he had a better idea. Von Neumann told me, 'You should call it entropy, for two reasons. In the first place your uncertainty function has been used in statistical mechanics under that name, so it already has a name. In the second place, and more important, no one really knows what entropy really is, so in a debate you will always have the advantage.'

The New Oxford Dictionary has declared Sarah Palin's word 'refudiate' to be the 2010 Word of the Year. Palin was honored and said she would do her best to 'dismangle' the English language.

Sarah Palin was delivering a speech and she said 'refudiate.' It's not a word – you have refute and repudiate, and she combined them. A lot of times that will happen and people will confuse combinations of words. I remember a couple years ago John McCain mistakenly combined the words Vice President and Palin.

And what better way to get people talking than by creating a new word.

That's one of the ways language evolved, by some very obscure form becoming common usage. And I must say that I'm very intrigued by use of language and slang, and criminal underground terms.

I mean, I'm certainly not a 'teaophyte,' or whatever the word would be.

And to bring in a new word by the head and shoulders, they leave out the old one.

Can one invent verbs? I want to tell you one: I sky you, so my wings extend so large to love you without measure.

It's really funny, because if you make up words, then people project their own meanings onto it, which I find interesting.

If you have a big enough dictionary, just about everything is a word.

To be honest, I struggle with words. I often forget them, you know, the official ones. Instead, I make words up. I use home-made words that sound similar to the real thing. Usually, they're some sort of confused hybrid of two existing words.

I've coined new words, like, misunderstanding and "Hispanically".

The bold and discerning writer who, recognizing the truth that language must grow by innovation if it grow at all, makes new words and uses the old in an unfamiliar sense has no following and is tartly reminded that 'it isn't in the dictionary' - although down to the time of the first lexicographer no author ever had used a word that was in the dictionary.

'Refudiate,' 'misunderestimate,' 'wee-wee'd up.' English is a living language. Shakespeare liked to coin new words too. Got to celebrate it!'

The extraordinary thing about new words is that probably only about one per cent of them are new. Most are old words revived and adapted.

Language is ever on the move, and most days, I check out the 'Urban Dictionary' where anyone can invent a new and useful word or phrase.

Well, "slithy" means "lithe and slimy." "Lithe" is the same as "active." You see it's like a portmanteau - there are two meanings packed up into one word.

Television? The word is half Greek, half Latin. No good can come of it.

One of the lesser-known ways of making new words is to form a blend - and a blend is when you run two words together to make a third word.

The emergence of a new term to describe a certain phenomenon, of a new adjective to designate a certain quality, is always of interest, both linguistically and from the point of view of the history of human thought.

What do you call that when you add '-ism' on the end of a word? What is that process? 'Wordism'? Something like that, yeah.

All I knew about the word cyberspace when I coined it, was that it seemed like an effective buzzword. It seemed evocative and essentially meaningless. It was suggestive of something, but had no real semantic meaning, even for me, as I saw it emerge on the page.

I hate the neologism "owned" for "scored a victory over". I have no intention of owning anyone, and nobody will ever own me.

Adapt your style, if you wish, to admit the color of slang or freshness of neologism, but hang tough on clarity, precision, structure, grace.

I am very proud of being the one to have coined the word.