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Friday, June 9th, 2006
Invented Profanity and Problematic Morphology
Friday, June 9th, 2006 08:06 pmWhile picking through that smorgasbord of linguistic delicacies, Language Log, I found this Wiki page on fake swear words, which includes one of my favourite semantic types, profanities invented by science fiction writers: “drokk”, “Grud”, “snut”, “trouk”, “funt”, “nerf-herder”, and of course “smeg”, which was made famous by Red Dwarf.
It appears there is no consensus as to whether rubipumilian “smeg” derives from “smegma”, a real word, though not really a swear word, albeit not the kind of thing you would mention in polite company (unless it were a polite company of gynaecologists). Being the word nerd I am, I was immediately struck with curiosity as to what the plural of “smegma” might be. “Smegmata”, perhaps? Merriam-Webster defined the word and even gave some etymology, claiming it as a late Latin word for “soap”, from an earlier Greek verb meaning “to wash”). However, no plural was given, presumably under the assumption that it is an uncountable noun. However, even uncountable nouns sometimes need plural forms, such as “cheeses” (varieties of cheese) or “sugars” (meaning “lumps of sugar”). The OED merely muddied the waters by informing me that the Latin “smegma” is an adjective. None of the online Latin-English dictionaries I consulted contained the word, so I have no way to establish the correct plural. If, for example, it is first declension, then the plural would not be “smegmata”, but the less glamorous “smegmae”. Or perhaps one should go back further to its Greek roots. Chambers classifies it as Greek in any case (though the only instance of “smegma” in the Perseus collection of Greek and Latin texts is from Pliny the Elder, and he is talking about copper smelting, not washing or gunge in your nether regions). In that case, it would be, er, um, “smegmai”?
All this confusion is simply part of the fun with obscure and invented words. When you are uncertain, you can be creative; thus we have “unices” as the plural of “unix” and “boxen” as the plural of “box” (though only when used to refer to computers—even an afficionado of unices would not say “I’m putting all my stuff into boxen”). Thus the plural of “nerf” (in the sense of the animal a nerf-herder herds) could be “nerves”, hence the tendency to misinterpret a Nabbooean when she says “He gets on my nerves”, which describes not an irritating person, but a free-rider.
It appears there is no consensus as to whether rubipumilian “smeg” derives from “smegma”, a real word, though not really a swear word, albeit not the kind of thing you would mention in polite company (unless it were a polite company of gynaecologists). Being the word nerd I am, I was immediately struck with curiosity as to what the plural of “smegma” might be. “Smegmata”, perhaps? Merriam-Webster defined the word and even gave some etymology, claiming it as a late Latin word for “soap”, from an earlier Greek verb meaning “to wash”). However, no plural was given, presumably under the assumption that it is an uncountable noun. However, even uncountable nouns sometimes need plural forms, such as “cheeses” (varieties of cheese) or “sugars” (meaning “lumps of sugar”). The OED merely muddied the waters by informing me that the Latin “smegma” is an adjective. None of the online Latin-English dictionaries I consulted contained the word, so I have no way to establish the correct plural. If, for example, it is first declension, then the plural would not be “smegmata”, but the less glamorous “smegmae”. Or perhaps one should go back further to its Greek roots. Chambers classifies it as Greek in any case (though the only instance of “smegma” in the Perseus collection of Greek and Latin texts is from Pliny the Elder, and he is talking about copper smelting, not washing or gunge in your nether regions). In that case, it would be, er, um, “smegmai”?
All this confusion is simply part of the fun with obscure and invented words. When you are uncertain, you can be creative; thus we have “unices” as the plural of “unix” and “boxen” as the plural of “box” (though only when used to refer to computers—even an afficionado of unices would not say “I’m putting all my stuff into boxen”). Thus the plural of “nerf” (in the sense of the animal a nerf-herder herds) could be “nerves”, hence the tendency to misinterpret a Nabbooean when she says “He gets on my nerves”, which describes not an irritating person, but a free-rider.