Ugliest neologism

On 11/16/03 3:42 PM, in article
[nq:1]Today's candidate: "WEBINAR"[/nq]
I vote for "mob".

[nq:1]Today's candidate: "WEBINAR"[/nq]
I nominate anything that ends in -rati or -ati or -razzi (as in "digerati"). Making it a pseudo-Italian word doesn't make it correct or even classy IMHO.

[nq:1]Today's candidate: "WEBINAR"[/nq]
An afterthought: CNN's absurd "factoid," supposedly to mean a little fact or a bit of trivia (and what's wrong with the word "trivia" anyway?). We've had the -oid argument debated here before.

-YJ

[nq:2]Today's candidate: "WEBINAR"[/nq]
[nq:1]I vote for "mob".[/nq]
My Dictionary of Australian Colloquialisms (G.A. Wilkes, 1978) has five citations for "mob" predating 1900, the earliest being 1838, Thomas Walker, "A Month in the Bush of Australia" 8: "I beheld a level plain, as even as a bowling green, not a rise nor a tree nor an object of any kind to interrupt the view, with the exce

[nq:2]I vote for "mob".[/nq]
[nq:1]My Dictionary of Australian Colloquialisms (G.A. Wilkes, 1978) has five citations for "mob" predating 1900, the earliest being 1838, Thomas ... the surface." Might that disqualify it as a neologism? There have been many worse coinages in the past 165 years.[/nq]
A little whooosh sound there, perhaps?
I assumed Carmen was referring to Jonathan Swift I

[nq:2]Today's candidate: "WEBINAR"[/nq]
[nq:1]An afterthought: CNN's absurd "factoid," supposedly to mean a little fact or a bit of trivia (and what's wrong with the word "trivia" anyway?). We've had the -oid argument debated here before.[/nq]
facã?»toid n ( fact + oid suffix suggestive of such words as void, spheroid, and Mongoloid, connoting qualities of emptiness and simulation): Any fa

[nq:1]fac =BBtoid n ( fact + oid suffix suggestive of such words as void, spheroid, and Mongoloid, ... it once appeared in print as a purported fact and has been treated as fact ever since. . . .[/nq]
The problem is that that is not the definition of the word as it is used by CNN: it is the definition for a word that at the time apparently did not exist ("Words That Don't Exist"), and is margi

[nq:1]I assumed Carmen was referring to Jonathan Swift I think it was Swift who, over 250 years ago, cited "mob" and other neologisms as evidence of the debasement of English.[/nq]
Voila!
.

This puts carries it back to 1710, and the text indicates that Swift had started even earlier.

Bob Lieblich
Part of the Mob

[nq:1]The suffix -oid has the clear sense "like, resembling", and has not lost that sense. A spheroid, for example, is ... but not quite truly spherical. In "factoid" as used by CNN, the ending is being used instead as a dimunitive,[/nq]
Whoops! Obvious typo. No official whistle.
[nq:1]since there is no suggestion that the datum at issue is not factual. Something like "factette" (ugh!) wou

[nq:2]I assumed Carmen was referring to Jonathan Swift I ... and other neologisms as evidence of the debasement of English.[/nq]
[nq:1]Voila! . This puts carries it back to 1710, and the text indicates that Swift had started even earlier.[/nq]
And besides, whether the word is to be considered a neologism or not is purely a matter of perspective, surely.
\\P. Schultz