10 words and phrases that are common today, invented by science fiction writers

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Neologisms are new words, phrases or expressions that become commonplace. Since in the Russian language "borrowed" words are taken mainly from English, let us consider where they come from in this language. Every year in Russia alone, up to a million books are published, and in many there are new words that after a while become part of everyday speech.

1. Nerd - Dr. Seuss

Theodore Seuss Geisel, better known as "Dr. Seuss", is often credited with the inventor of the word "nerd." It first appeared in the 1950 book If I Were a Zoo Director, but it was not used in the same context as it is today. In the book, a boy named Gerald McGrew visits the zoo but doesn't like the local animals. Therefore, he stated that if he was the director of the zoo, he would have brought the best animals. Nerd (which was translated into Russian as "nerd") and was one of the types of these animals.

When representatives of the press contacted Geisel regarding the use of the word invented by him, the writer did not even remember where this idea came from and said: "google, there will probably be an answer."

The word was first used in a modern context in a Newsweek article published on October 8, 1951. Then it was about the slang that teenagers used in Detroit.

2. Quark - James Joyce

James Joyce wrote Finnegans Wake for 17 years and published it in 1939, just two years before his death. This is one of the most difficult books in English. Its non-linear plot is like a dream, in which the narrative constantly jumps over many completely different characters.

Despite the fact that Joyce had nothing to do with particle physics, he helped contribute to her vocabulary. In 1963, Murray Gell-Mann was looking for a name for his theoretical elementary particle of matter, which is smaller than a proton or neutron. Initially, Gell-Mann coined the word "kwork", but its pronunciation was consonant with the word "pork" ("pork" in English), so the scientist never used it.

Months later, Gell-Man read Finnegans Wake and came across the line "Three quarks for Mr. Mark!" (seagulls were screaming her there). Voila - the name for his new particle was ready. Moreover, the book spoke about "three" quarks, and Gell-Mann believed that there are just 3 types of quarks.

3. "Catch-22" - Joseph Heller

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller is set during World War II and tells the story of a bomber pilot named John Yossarian. The term "catch-22" according to the book is a paradox in which "trying to escape makes salvation impossible."

There are several examples of Catch-22 in the novel, and the main one is related to the sanity of the bomber pilots. There is a rule that if a crew member is "abnormal" or in a nervous breakdown, he is not allowed to fly on a mission. Therefore, all you need to do to avoid relegation is to tell your commander that you are "slightly out of your mind." However, if a person realizes that he is crazy, this proves that he is not crazy, so he can be sent on a flight.

Another example of 'Catch-22' was told by actress Mary Murphy, who stated: “There is a catch-22 in show business - an actor won't have a job if he doesn't have an agent, but he won't have an agent if he never worked..

Since the publication of the novel in 1961, the term has entered the English lexicon to describe the following paradox: "Damn if you do this, and be damned if you don't."

4. Yahoo - Jonathan Swift

Jonathan Swift's classic Gulliver's Journey follows four different journeys. In the last of them, the protagonist Lemuel Gulliver arrived on an island inhabited by the Huygnhnms, a race of intelligent and talking horses. Also on the island live "ehu" - unreasonable wild humanoids who are subordinate to the Guygnhnms.

The word Yahoo has since become firmly established in the English language, meaning "boorish, rude or stupid person."

As for the technology company Yahoo !, its founders chose a similar name because Yahoo was originally a directory of other sites organized in a hierarchical format and the word yahoo is essentially an acronym for Yet Another Hierarchically Organized Oracle.).

5. Utopia - Sir Thomas More

Thomas More's book Utopia was published in 1516 in Latin and is a story about an ideal state. It is a socio-political satire that raises questions about whether an ideal world is possible.

Moreover, the very name “utopia” was formed thanks to the play on words in the ancient Greek language. Ou-topos means "nowhere" or "non-existent place" and eu-topos means "good place". The term turned out to be so relevant that it quickly became an independent word. Also Thomas More is indirectly responsible for the creation of the word "dystopia". After all, without utopia, there would be no dystopia.

6. Cyberspace - William Gibson

William Gibson is one of the leading figures in the cyberpunk genre and he also coined the term "cyberspace". In a short story published in 1982 titled The Burning of Chromium, he describes cyberspace as a “massive consensus hallucination” between computer networks.

Gibson expanded on the idea of cyberspace in his famous 1984 book Neuromancer. There he describes cyberspace as follows: “It is a graphical representation of data, abstracted from the data banks of each computer for human perception. Incredible complexity. Lines of light oscillate in the "nonspace" of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. And they twinkle like city lights."

Therefore, while Gibson did not accurately predict what cyberspace was, he was the first person to use the term to describe a network of computers.

7. Meme - Richard Dawkins

Renowned evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins first coined the term "meme" in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. The main idea of the book is that genes strive for immortality, and any forms of life (including people) are just vessels that are used to achieve this goal. It was one of the first bestselling popular science books. In the book, Dawkins compares genes to cultural units he calls memes.

He wrote: “memes (discrete units of knowledge, gossip, jokes, etc.) are for culture what genes are for life. Just as biological evolution is driven by the survival of the most successful genes in the gene pool, cultural evolution can be driven by the most successful memes.”

Dawkins said that he first became acquainted with the meme when he was 7 years old and he lived in a boarding school. Every night the boys had to say the following prayer: “Light up our darkness, I beg You, Lord; and by your great mercy protect us from all the dangers of this night. Amen . At that time, he, like the rest of the boys, did not understand the meaning of the words. Dawkins later realized that it was part of the culture passed down from generation to generation, which is not much different from genes passed down from generation to generation.

8. Factoid - Norman Mailer

Marilyn: A Biography is a famous photobiography about Marilyn Monroe, which was written by two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Norman Mailer. The book was incredibly controversial because Mailer suggested that the FBI and CIA killed Monroe because of her relationship with President Robert Kennedy.

This is also the first time the word "factoid" has been used. Many people think it means a short, interesting fact. In fact, it is something similar to a fact, but not a fact. Roughly speaking, this is an unreliable statement that is passed off as the truth. An example would be the "fact" that the Great Wall of China can be seen from space.

9.229 Words - William Shakespeare

When it comes to inventing words, William Shakespeare is often credited with introducing over 1,000 (and sometimes 2,000) words and phrases into the English language. However, this is an exaggeration.

The whole problem of this statement boils down to the Oxford English Dictionary, which is considered the most complete catalog of the English language. When describing each term, it refers to the earliest known use of that word. When the dictionary was published in 1923, it was compiled from volunteer records. Many of them looked for words primarily in the works of Shakespeare because of their popularity and ease of accessibility. In fact, Shakespeare could safely use words that were found in older, less well-known texts that the volunteers who kept records for the Oxford Dictionary did not know about. In addition, many of Shakespeare's contributions to the English language were not words, but phrases like "not all that glitters is gold" and "the devil incarnate."

However, Shakespeare is still credited as the creator of 229 words, which is incredibly impressive. For example, these are "bubble", "eyeball" and "wormhole".

10.630 Words - John Milton

When John Milton wrote Paradise Lost in the 17th century, the English language was much more sparse than it is today, and this allowed writers to get away with creating new words. As a result, Milton is credited with introducing 630 different words into the English language.

Many of them have gone out of fashion, such as "unsightly" and "blood red". But he also used some words for the first time that are still common today. One of his most famous neologisms is the word "pandemonium", which in his work was the name of the capital of hell. Also Milton owns the words "flavor", "space", etc.