The Purity Of The English Language

Prompted by a now-deleted post on a snark* community complaining that 'grok' is a fictional term and is not proper language, regardless of whether it's in the OED...

Since everybody else seems to have strongly-held views on the subject of New Words, I thought I'd have a go at coming up with a compromise that will annoy everyone equally. And just to make sure of that, I'll start by calling on mathematics - specifically, information theory - to dictate a few rules of language. The math-phobic can skip the cut; it's just there to justify some of the principles presented after it.

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lederhosen's principles of vocabulary. Note that some of these conflict, and have to be weighed against one another, except for rule 9 which is non-negotiable.

1. Important (in particular, common) concepts should have compact expressions. The more it's used, the shorter it ought to be.

2. As our world and context changes, so does the importance of various concepts. It's no longer as important to be able to say "bear" in a hurry as it used to be; "computer", OTOH, has become ubiquitous.

3. To keep language effective, it needs to be able to change to reflect these facts. Where there's a need for a new word, or a shortening of an existing word, we should be willing to accept such novelties.

4. If a lot of people adopt a neologism, this is evidence that such a word was needed, and can be taken as grounds for its acceptance.

5. Exception to #4: if there's already a perfectly good & compact word for this purpose, use that one instead. Neologisms should be created due to need, not ignorance and laziness.

6. Exception to #4: Where possible, neologisms should be user-friendly. As far as possible, this means following existing patterns of language. Adapting existing English is great; borrowing from other languages is good. Words derived from Latin etc. are more likely to be readily understood and accepted than words made up from scratch.

7. Exception to #6: Sometimes, insistence on following existing patterns may get in the way of #1 and #3. Latin constructions tend to become fairly long; as such, they're admirably suited for necessary but uncommon pieces of vocabulary - for instance, many academic terms - but less so for things like "blog".

8. User-friendliness also means avoiding ambiguity. English already has more than enough homophones, thank you very much.

9. Numbers are not letters and should not be used phonetically, EVER, with a possible exception for Sinead O'Connor when covering Prince.

I quite like 'grok' because it satisfies almost all of the above principles. It offers a compact and unambiguous word for an important nuance that isn't adequately conveyed by any other short form - 'understand' and 'comprehend' are longer, and as with 'know' they lack the connotations of fully absorbing and coming to terms with the concept. (Indeed, the fact that it's hard to explain 'grok' except by example is a proof that the niche exists.) The only one it doesn't satisfy is relationship to pre-existing language, and I think the others greatly outweigh this.

*Carrollites will no doubt appreciate the irony.

Domesticity

This afternoon, Rey and I caught up on the gardening. You'd think white scale and black spot would cancel one another out, but nooooo. Inside, we had a plague of flies last week, which Rey resolved by buying a Venus Flytrap called Fang; it took him about three days to catch and eat all of them. Good Fang!

Rey's mother came and picked us up on Friday after the alternator died (now replaced). She dropped us back at home, and was then talked into staying for dinner and a game of Settlers of Catan, throughout which we insulted one another mercilessly. My mother-in-law rocks. Just thought I'd mention that.