Novel words and word play
If you had been walking down the street in Ithaca, New York, several years ago, you might have looked up and seen a sign for the music store “Rebop,” a name that owes its inspiration to the jazz term rebop.1 Rebop was originally one of the many nonsense expressions that jazz musicians threw into their vocal improvisations, starting in the early 1920s. In the 1940s, rebop became interchangeable with bebop, a term of similar origin, as the term for the rhythmically and harmonically eccentric music played by young black musicians. By the 1950s the name of this musical style was quite firmly established as simply bop.2 Today, the original use of rebop is known only to cognoscenti, so that most people who pass by the store will be likely to interpret the word as composed of the word bop and the prefix re-, which means approximately ‘again’. This prefix can attach only to verbs, so we must interpret bop as a verb here. Rebop must therefore mean ‘bop again’, if it means anything at all. And this music store, appropriately, specialized in selling used CDs. There’s something going on here with English morphology. Rebop is not a perfectly well-formed English word. The verb bop means something like ‘bounce’, but the prefix re- normally attaches only to a verb whose meaning denotes an accomplishment. The verb rebop therefore makes little sense. But names of stores and products are designed to catch the consumer’s attention, not necessarily to make sense, and this one does so by exploiting people’s knowledge of English in a fairly complex way and breaking the rules so as to attract attention, as verbal art often does.
Consider now the following phrases, taken from a Toni Braxton song: Unbreak my heart, uncry these tears.
We have never seen anyone unbreak something, and you certainly can’t uncry tears, but every English speaker can understand these words. We all know what it means to unbreak somebody’s heart or to wish that one’s heart were unbroken. If we asked somebody, “unbreak my heart,” we would be asking them to reverse the process of having our heart broken. We can visualize “uncry these tears,” too – think of a film running backwards. We can understand these words because we know the meaning of un-, which, when attached to a verb, reverses or undoes an action. The fact that these particular actions, breaking a heart and crying tears, cannot be reversed only adds poignancy to the song.
All human beings have this capacity for generating and understanding novel words. Sometimes someone creates an entirely new word, as J. R. R. Tolkien did when he coined the now-familiar term hobbit. But more often than not, we build new words from pre-existing pieces, as with unbreak and uncry, or as with hobbitish and hobbit-like, built by adding suffixes to the stem hobbit. We could easily go on to create more words on these patterns.
Novel words are all around us. Jerry Seinfeld has talked about the shushers, the shushees, and the unshushables in a movie theater. Morley Safer was dubbed quirkologist – expert on quirky people – on a special episode of 60 Minutes. For those who hate buffets, the TV character Frasier Crane used the term smorgsaphobia. The longest novel morphologically complex word we have been able to find on our own in the daily press is deinstitutionalization, from the New York Times.
These are everyday morphological facts, the kind you run across every day as a literate speaker of English. What all these words – rebop, unbreak, uncry, hobbit, hobbitish, hobbit-like, quirkologist, smorgsaphobia, and deinstitutionalization – have in common is their newness. When we saw or heard them for the first time, they leapt out at us. It is interesting that novel words do this to us, because novel sentences generally do not. When you hear a new sentence, you generally don’t realize that it is the first time that you’ve heard it, and you don’t say to yourself, “What a remarkable sentence,” unless it happens to be one from Proust or Joyce or some other verbal artist. Many people have made the observation before that morphology differs from syntax in this way.
1 Conveniently, it happened to blend the first names of the two owners, Renee and Bob.
2 We thank Krin Gabbard for the etymology of rebop.
