Understanding trendy neologisms

Abstract

New words have been entering English at an ever increasing rate. Although this phenomenon is often associated with new things, processes, and concepts that need names, there is also a great increase, indeed acceleration, in clever, trendy, eye-and-ear-catching words. I have been especially interested in blends – underlying compounds in which part of one word or both words are clipped. A few blends have existed for a long time. Smog (smoke + fog) is cited in Merriam Webster dictionaries and the OED in 1905. Soliloquacity (< soliloquy + loquacity) is dated as 1895. However, in the last two or three decades blends have become even more common, and nowadays, one encounters new blends almost every day. Unfortunately, linguistics textbooks and other books dealing with morphology and lexicology treat blends as peripheral to English word-formation and therefore unimportant. While this may have been true in the past, it no longer is the case. In this article I will discuss some reasons for the popularity of neologisms

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