Birthing new Words illustrated by Quidditch
Although people rarely died playing Quidditch, referees had been known to vanish and turn up months later in the Sahara Desert.
〰 J.K. Rowling 〰
photo © Karthik Sridasyam on Unsplash
Vital Signs of a Newborn Word
Predicting the linguistic future is always a dangerous activity
〰 David Crystal 〰
Not every new word invented by anyone who loves making up new words is a neologism. On the other hand, every word in the dictionary must have been a neologism at some point.
This means neologism doesn’t describe a type of word, but rather a developmental phase words go through ~ like every adult has been a child at an earlier stage in life, while not all babies survive into adulthood.
Neologism [from Greek neo = new + logos = word] is a relatively young English word itself. It was adopted in 1772 from French néologisme along with its definition ~ “practice of innovation in language, the use of new words or old words in new senses,”
When a new word is introduced by a neologist, it is not yet called a neologism. It is strictly speaking a nonce word. The difference between a nonce word and a neologism is of a similar kind as the distinction between a baby and a child.
In my wordcasts on Symbiopædia I am introducing quite a few new words as neologisms. Strictly speaking, this is incorrect. They are nonce words ~ babies which haven’t yet proven their strength of survival.
My excuse is that I don’t want to confuse you with too much linguistic jargon. Another reason is that I am doing my best to nurture these word-babies, to give them the best possible start in life. Whether they’ll survive into neologism-hood or not is not entirely in my hands. I am delighted that some have been adopted instantly!
Linguists have a scale to measure the ‘vital force’ of a word-baby to predict whether it will survive ~ comparable with measuring the vital signs of a newborn. It is called the FUDGE scale and stands for Frequency, Unobtrusiveness, Diversity of users and situations, Generation of other forms and meanings, and Endurance of the concept.
Another reason I am calling the new word creations in the wildwordwoods of Symbiopædia neologisms is that these words are our symbionts. They make a significant contribution to our ability to sustain life and ourselves while moving into the Symbiocene.
Given that growing numbers of creative fellow humans, thinkers, writers, eco-activists, artists, regenerative gardeners, and anyone who loves our Motherplanet has a vested interest in the Symbiocene, I see good chances of survival for this neologistic vocabulary, according to the FUDGE scale.
Being new-born words, the question is, do neologisms have an etymology?
The answer is, as long as they are made up of known word elements, they belong to one or more word-families, which means they have ancestors.
photos © Dave Hoefler + William Warby on Unsplash
Word Histories
Maybe I don’t understand Quidditch, but at least my happiness doesn’t depend on Ron’s goal keeping ability.
〰 Hermione Granger 〰
One of the most famous neologisms in recent English literary history is the word Quidditch, coined by J.K. Rowling for her Harry Potter series. She needed a game for her story, and she needed a name for it.
Since she made it all up, we might assume that the word is not related to any other word in any language, right?
Wrong. Even though the word ‘quidditch’ was made up by J.K. Rowling, she didn’t create the name, or the game, in a vacuum. She wrote pages and pages of words beginning with ‘Q’ until she came up with a name she liked.
Quidditch can be split into two English words ~ quid + ditch.
Quid has two meanings in English. One is a lump of chewing tobacco, but the word itself comes from cud = the partly digested food in the mouth of a cow.
The more common quid is another name for pound sterling the currency of England. It’s also used for money in general in Australia.
Quid comes from Latin, meaning what or something. It has been used in the sense of cash since the 17th century.
If we had to choose one of the two quids as a relative of quidditch it would probably be the cash. One reason is that it is a competitive game, and there is a prize for the winner at the end.
Another reason is that Rowling probably never thought of ‘cud’ when she wrote Harry Potter or designed the game. And if she did, well, that’s a risk etymologists take all the time…
Quiddity is an interesting word closely related to quid. The original Latin word quidditas can be translated into whatness, meaning the essence of things or ‘what makes one thing different from others.’
Quidditch is played by two teams who are in essence different from one another.
In the 1530s quiddity took on a new meaning and was used in the sense of “a trifling nicety in argument, a quibble.”
As part of the background story of Quidditch, Rowling shares an interesting piece of information. She designed the game after a row with her boyfriend. In other words, she’d just had a quibble (= a trivial argument or slight objection) or perhaps even a quarrel (= an angry argument) with her boyfriend.
While designing Quidditch some queries (questions, doubts about) the relationship may have been at the back of the mind of the inventor of the game and its name. She was in a quarrelsome, and perhaps querulous mood.
Incidentally, all five words, quibble, quarrel, quarrelsome, query, and querulous are — via Latin — related to quiddity and quid and therefore distant cousins of the new word quidditch.
Some quiddity is also contained in the meaning of the game itself. The annotated first edition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone contains three notes by the author.
photo © Serafima Lazarenk on Unsplash
The Invention of Quidditch
Don’t chase the quaffle if you see the snitch
〰 Quidditch rule 〰
Quidditch “was invented in a small hotel in Manchester after a row with my then boyfriend,” J.K. Rowling tells us.
“I had been pondering the things that hold a society together, cause it to congregate and signify its particular character and knew I needed a sport,” she adds.
And then adds the confession, “It infuriates men...which is quite satisfying given my state of mind when I invented it.”
The second part of the word, ditch has been around in English since the 14th century in the sense of a ‘trench made by digging’. It is related to dijk in Dutch and Deich in German (both mean dam). Dike is also used in English in the sense of embankment.
The verb to ditch originally meant to dig a ditch, or surround with a ditch. It probably related to the large ditches, a.k.a. moats, wealthy people used to dig around their castles and towns in those days.
In the 19th century, when moats were no longer so common, the meaning of ditch was transferred to throw into a ditch and especially to throw a train off the tracks.
Now this is interesting in relation to the rules of the game Quidditch. Two wild black iron balls called Bludgers fly around and try to ditch players off their brooms.
And didn’t Rowling mention that the game ‘infuriates men...which is quite satisfying given my state of mind when I invented it’? Presumably she ditched the boyfriend some time after the quibble or quarrel leading up to the invention of Quidditch.
Incidentally, the word quidditch is not a totally new invention in English. It can be found in an Anglo-Saxon place name cwǣð-dīc, meaning mud-ditch.
Rowling either discovered this later, or had already done some research and revived the old word intentionally. In her book Quidditch Through the Ages she wrote her own etymology of the word: “it was named for where it was first played, Queerditch Marsh. The witch Gertie Keddle lived next to the march around 1050 and noted down how the game developed.”
Rowling’s etymology connects the word quidditch with queer. This is (completely unrelated to quid) most probably a close cousin of the German quer, meaning lying across. It came into English around 1500 and took on the sense of strange, peculiar, odd.
The “Queerditch Marsh etymology” all sounds a bit queer too, since neither queer nor ditch were part of the English language in 1050 when “the witch Gertie Keddle lived next to the marsh…”
The definition of etymology as the search for the “true original meaning of words” comes from the Greek words — etumon (= true thing) + logos (= word). It often leads to the idea that knowing about a word’s origin and original meaning makes us better understand its present use, which is obviously not true because the meanings of words change all the time. (Just think of the current use of the word queer.)
It also gives the impression that a word with an ‘etymological pedigree’ so to speak has a higher value than one where the origin is not known. As if there is a ‘privileged class of words’ with a proven etymological history, and a ‘lower class’ of not etymologically connected words.
(note the undertones of supremacy and discrimination embedded in the Anthropocentric concept of etymology)
Quidditch is living proof that etymological pedigree has nothing to do with the success or popularity of a new word. From some quibbling beginnings, its journey has risen above all expectations of its author. J.K. Rowling is quids in, and this neologism is part of her success story.
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