Language purists may regard the spread of Simpsonisms as another example of the craptacular erosion of the mother tongue. But the mark of a living language is the ability to absorb strange new accretions. Any tongue that can absorb the language of Homer is in robust good health, and any word that embiggens the vocabulary is perfectly cromulent with me.
[An article in the Times Online mentioned in a posting on Language Log.]This message has been edited. Last edited by: zmježd,
Hmmm, did somebody delete something? If not, I am confused!
It's just another example of how language evolves. I found it interesting how Liberman made a couple of off-hand comments and now he says he may " become famous as the source of this quotation..." The quotation was that "the Simpsons has apparently taken over from Shakespeare and the Bible as our culture's greatest source of idioms, catchphrases and sundry other textual allusions."
I suppose he was trying to be ironic since the word was coined by Bart Simpson...
Yes, zmj, let's hope we can get beyond typos here. From what I've seen, everyone here has made mistakes from time to time...some of us more than others.
Why hasn't my coinage, "etrahation" caught on as a synonym for the current state of pedagogy?
There is a word from the verb in question: extraction from Latin extraho (extrahere, extraxi, extractum) 'to pull out; drag out; waste time'. I guess you could coin etraction, but it sounds like something one does on FaceBook or MySpace
“[T]he term 'lupper', coined by Homer to refer to a large, cholesterol-laden meal midway between lunch and supper, is so valuable I am amazed no one invented it before.”
No so. The New York Times used it in 1983, and it can be traced back in print sources at least as far as 1970.
