ia play

How many different ways of saying someone has an apt name are there? Wikipedia plumps for Nominative Determinism but goes on to say:

“Synonyms and/or related concepts include aptronym, apronym, aptonym, jobonymns, namephreaks, onomastic determinism, Perfect Fit Last Names (PFLNs), psychonymics, and classically nomen est omen or όνομα ορίζοντας. ND researchers are comiconomenclaturists.”

And that list isn’t particularly exhaustive, missing out on Tom Stoppard’s “cognomen syndrome”for one.

Sadly, this post has nothing to do with lego men. A hapax legomenon (or ‘a thing once said’) is a word occurring only once in the written body of a language. It’s kind of the classical scholars version of GoogleWhacking.

Reading about hapaxes has led me to the discovery that honorificabilitudinitatibus is the longest word in the English language featuring alternating consonants and vowels. Sure to come in useful one day.

Other discoveries:

nonce word - one made up for the occasion, possibily with no expectation of reuse

stunt word - created to artificially suggest importance, or coined merely to demonstrate how clever the coiner is.

Daniel Gilbert’s homepage is the fabulously named hedonic psychology laboratory within which there is a page called ‘playing’. The page has the tag line ‘frivolous linkageZ’ (he’s got a thing about Z).

Slightly outside most people’s expectations for the page is the section called deathZ -which includes the links to Find a Grave and Dying Words .

Control a Man in a Chicken Suit, Kwazy Rabbit and Walls with Things Written On Them are probably closer to mainstream definitions of playful.

Matt Jones also mention Gary Penn’s concept of ‘toyetics’, an interesting concept but one I can’t help feeling is destined for another list of hated words, just like this Lulu Blooker list.

I had ambivalent feelings about that Lulu list since one of the ‘winners’ folksonomy has dogged the last few years of my career, with far too many people, who should know better, getting confused about a useful idea and thinking it means we can get rid of all the BBC’s librarians.

But neologisms seem to be another way we entertain ourselves. Fun with words, even. The BBC’s newfangled broadcasting mechanism once upset C. P. Scott, the editor of my old employer the (Manchester) Guardian:

“Television? The word is half Greek, half Latin. No good can come of it” - C. P. Scott

Just like metadata then, another common work topic.

And this week Information Architect as a job title was lampooned in Private Eye using, shock horror, a BBC job ad in their Birt-Speak feature.

I’m neologisms all over at the moment.