Nearly a year ago, Roberto De Vido sent me a link to an article from the Boston Globe about a new word – a rather fun and useful new word – and the bit of a kerfuffle it had created. It’s taken me a while to get to this suggestion – I have older ones still waiting too – but that gives the benefit of a year’s perspective and the chance to see the sequelae.
It all started with this comic from the great geek strip xkcd: xkcd.com/739/ . The strip (for those not disposed to click through) shows a Wikipedia page for the word malamanteau. The definition is “A malamanteau is a neologism for a portmanteau created by incorrectly combining a malapropism with a neologism.” The caption is “Ever notice how Wikipedia has a few words it really likes?”
But the word wasn’t in Wikipedia. Yet. (Actually, Wiktionary would be the more appropriate place for an entry on a word.) The word was not being used for the very first time in the strip, but nearly. So, naturally, as the Boston Globe article recounted, the word was quickly added to Urban Dictionary and Wordnik – and, of course, to Wikipedia. And just as quickly removed from Wikipedia. Though not without generating a lot of debate between Wikipedia editors, mainly about whether it was a real word and whether it was notable.
Now, notable – there’s a word Wikipedia really likes. One thing you need to be aware of with regard to Wikipedia editors is that they are not like editors of, for instance, the Encyclopedia Britannica or the Oxford English Dictionary. They did not get the job due to expertise. Actually, it’s not a job at all; it’s a volunteer position. And anyone can join in the fray. But the ones who tend to prevail are the ones who put the most time and energy into it. Unfortunately, this means that it attracts a disproportionate portion of crankish no-lifers who want to be important and to set the rules in their own little corner of the universe. And the “information wants to be free” ethos that is the supposed founding spirit of Wikipedia is strongly subject to the itchy delete fingers of high-school-not-yet-grads and chronic career jumping beans, who, rather than letting information be free, will spike an article if, in their Napoleonic estimation, it’s not “notable”.
This is not, of course, to say that all Wikipedia editors and contributors are dweebs with an exaggerated sense of the ambit of their own knowledge. And indeed, Wikipedia is a very useful source of information, though one forgets at one’s peril that it cannot be assumed to be as reliable as expert-reviewed material. The point at hand here, though, is if you look for malamanteau in Wikipedia now, you will only find a reference to it in the article on xkcd – as “a stunt word.” You won’t find it at all on Wiktionary, which will instead direct you to malamante, which (perhaps fittingly) is Esperanto for “hatingly” or “hatefully”.
No fear if you want to find it elsewhere, though. It gets about 14,000 hits on Google. It’s still in Urban Dictionary, Wordnik, and assorted other sites that are not subject to the same ethos as Wikipedia. The question, though, is whether Wikipedia is right. Is it – like, for instance, floccinaucinihilipilification – a stunt word, one that is never really used in earnest for its denotative value? May one thereby floccinaucinihilipilificate it?
Well, before xkcd used it, it had already been used (not much, though) as a blend of malapropism and portmanteau. And it’s still useful – it’s by far the tidiest way to refer to words such as misunderstimate, refudiate, insinuendo, bewilderness, flustrated, ambiviolent, and misconscrewed (it up). So it has clear value as a word. It fills a gap neatly. It’s a nice malamute to add to the dog team on the linguistic sled of meaning. It’s reasonably mellifluous – nasals and a liquid, and an alternation between the lips and the tip of the tongue.
And it has a very good chance of sticking in the language due to the notoriety given it not just by the comic but, perhaps more importantly, by the insta-smite response it got on Wikipedia. In effect, by the very act of declaring the word not notable, those who did so helped to make it notable. In their flustrated attempts to refudiate it, they misunderstimated it; they misconscrewed it up and now they’re just in the bewilderness. And without even the mot juste.
Sesquiotica 
chatterati
This word has nothing to do with Chattanooga (except for inasmuch as it probably has some chatterati in it, as would any town big enough to have a TV station) or anyone named Chatterton or Chatterjee (allowing that someone of either name may be a member of the chatterati). No, it’s a blend made through forcing an Anglo-Saxon verb (chatter) onto a Latin-derived pseudomorpheme (-erati, the ending of literati). It’s like a fish tied to a fowl – or perhaps like some cross-breed between the one and the other.
Well, we know chatter. Originally it’s what magpies do – and other fast-vocalizing birds too, at first including those that are now said to twitter. Now we more often talk of people chattering – as the OED puts it so nicely, “Of human beings: To talk rapidly, incessantly, and with more sound than sense.” And there’s more than enough of that when politics is the news of the day. There’s a whole chattering class, as they are often called, prattling in their rat-a-tat fashion, a bit like woodpeckers except that it’s their heads that are the wood and they’re pecking at each other. They strive to read the entrails that will foretell the future, but really they’re just eating each other’s chitterlings.
As to literati, it means in origin “the literate people”, but now that literacy is nearly universal, it means “the highly literate people”. It has a taste of an elite – a sort of illuminati, but not secret and not necessarily pulling the reins of power. So it’s a nice base for adding, for instance, glitter to make glitterati, “the glittering stars of fashionable society” (often pursused by paparazzi) – or, more recent, chatter to make chatterati, “the chattering class”. These words have a hardness of feel, possibly brittle but also possible as untriturable as a diamond. At the very least, the words suggest the clicking of teeth as jaws rattle on.
The chattering class, in their modishness and striving to be au courant, seem naturally to foster lexical syncretism. Another word for the same set is the commentariat – a term that, like chatterati, first showed up in the 1990s; it’s a merger of commentary with proletariat (it also smacks of secretariat).
But now political commentary is not just the preserve of television talking heads, audibly rattling out their sound and fury in a human teletype patter. Blogs are an important source of political information and opinion (inasmuch as there is such a thing as an important source of political opinion – politics and its commentary suffer from a surfeit of opinion and a deficiency of fact), so now we also have the bloggerati. Which is an especially amusing word morphologically, as it involves two mid-morpheme clippings – the -erati one, but also the blog one, since blog is short for weblog, a compound of web and log. On the other hand, its voiced stops give it a kind of bluntness and dullness that make it a less appealing word.
But the real problem with blogs (I’m being sarcastic, by the way, when I say “problem”) is that they allow expression of thought, fact, and insight in depth (they don’t enforce it, but it’s possible). Ack! Who wants that? Isn’t it much better to get it in short, quick bursts, limited to 140 characters? OK, yes, some of those 140 characters can be a link to a lengthy article. But the premise is really that one can say something useful, something valuable, in 140 characters (or fewer) – short bursts of chattering, of twittering: discourse gone to the birds. Naturally, those who chatter on Twitter – in particular on popular current topics – are lately called the twitterati.
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Posted in word tasting notes
Tagged bloggerati, chatterati, commentariat, twitterati, word tasting notes