If you or your chatmate are looking for a nilogism or mislexis, don’t wait till an earar
At the beginning of the year I devoted this column to words that don’t exist. By that I meant things for which there ought to be a word, but there isn’t. This is itself, of course, one of them: we have no English word for the absence of what would be a useful word, should anyone care to coin one.
Or, rather, we didn’t. We do now, because among the many suggestions sent in subsequently by readers of that column, there have been two proposals for ways of filling precisely this gap. The first is my own favourite: nilogism. There will be objections to this from purists, however, because it mixes Latin and Greek. A viable alternative comes from another reader: mislexis. South Africans (a reader assures me) have a term of their own for something that may well have a name but, if it does, the speaker has forgotten it: dingus, which means ‘whatchamacallit, whatsisname or thingummyjig’.
Explaining what I meant by ‘missing’ words, I gave by way of example a gap that irritates me as a journalist who often needs to make a report. There is no good, plain English term for ‘the person I/you/he was/ were talking to’. A number of readers have reminded me that the familiar French interlocuteur has its English equivalent: interlocutor. I did know that, but it’s hardly a workaday sort of word, and I doubt we could popularise it for use in the pub. A better fit is offered by chatmate, but even so, the term implies a familiarity which may or may not have been present. Some readers have suggested ‘friend’ or ‘hearer’, but the neutral expression we lack should not imply that the person is on friendly terms, or that he or she is necessarily listening.
Which brings us to the word whose lack a great many of my correspondents lament: a pronoun for ‘he or she’ that avoids the use of the ugly ‘they’. An ingenious correspondent has suggested sorm, this being an abbreviated rendering of ‘sir or madam’, but to rephrase the phrase above as ‘... or that the sorm is necessarily listening’ is displeasing.
Nor have readers offered much help in filling a gap which a number have identified: we have no pleasant, gender-unspecific but unambiguous word for adult human children. I am of course (at 59) my mother’s child, but when children go half price that excludes me. ‘Son’ and ‘daughter’ are truly age-unspecific, but with ‘child’ it depends on the context. ‘Offspring’ seems rather zoological, while the legalistic/Biblical ‘issue’ doesn’t sound very nice at all.
Readers have been more helpful with suggestions for the gap left by our dictionary’s failure to offer an antithesis for ‘benefit’. Obviously it should be malefit. One of the malefits of writing columns like this is that I’ve started using some of the new vocabulary, forgetting that others are not yet familiar with it, and bewildering my ... er, interlocutors, or chatmates. I intend to do my best to popularise malefit, along with another excellent proposal: a term to describe the sort of celebrity who is really just a nobody who has become famous for being famous — or nonebrity.
Occasionally correspondents have corrected me. I suggested that a Chishona word from Zimbabwe, ‘guti’, meaning a very fine, spray-like drizzle, had no English equivalent; but there seems to be a word spelt variously by readers as ‘smir’, ‘smirr’ and ‘smur’, that sounds just right for the job but has fallen from usage. Other correspondents have indicated nilogisms I had overlooked — such as our lack of any concise terms for the acronym that appears in the classified dating columns of newspapers and magazines, and, increasingly, on the internet: GSOH — or ‘possessing a good sense of humour’. This most emphatically does not mean ‘humorous’: the joker may be humorous, but his (or her) chatmate needs to have a GSOH.
And is there (one reader asks) a word for someone we have all encountered: the male equivalent of a nymphomaniac? Might it be a satyromaniac? Neither ‘girl-crazy’ nor even ‘womaniser’ conveys the disgrace that ‘nymphomaniac’ implies — you couldn’t describe a lady friend as ‘a bit of a nymphomani ac’ with the indulgent chuckle that often accompanies ‘womaniser’ — but this may owe more to cultural asymmetries than linguistic gaps. A more straightforward omission is our language’s failure to offer a term for ‘the day after tomorrow’: Gaelic (a correspondent tells me) has the useful an earar. Next we could seek a single word for ‘the day before yesterday’.
Many readers have quoted to me the dictionary of invented names for common thoughts, objects or experiences included in Douglas Adams’s and John Lloyd’s The Meaning of Liff: a splendid list from which I shall give just one example, the verb aboyne, meaning ‘to beat an expert at a game of skill by playing so appallingly that none of his clever tactics or strategies are of any use to him’. This is my mother’s approach to Monopoly.
And I’m finding it hard to expel from my mind a word Jamaicans have (I am assured) for the dried excrement that can cling to the hairs around the anus. Ras means ‘arse’ and clat means (literally) ‘clot’: hence rasclat: surely an indispensable term.
But some of the gaps that readers have brought to my attention are really serious. We don’t have a term for our country do we? Is it ‘Britain’ — in which case what does the term ‘Great Britain’ or ‘GB’ being used of our team in the Olympics, add? And what’s the difference between ‘Great Britain’ and ‘the United Kingdom’? If it’s the presence or otherwise of Northern Ireland then ‘Team GB’ is a slur on the Union.
Asked (one reader tells me) what might be the English equivalent of the French sensibilité, Lord Palmerston replied ‘humbug’ — reminding me of a Derbyshire farming friend whose pronunciation of ‘reservoir’ as ‘reservoyer’ prompted me to ask him how, in that case, he would pronounce ‘abattoir’. ‘Slaughter’ouse,’ he replied.
Which brings me to my favourite letter, from a man in neighbouring Staffordshire. ‘Most needed,’ he writes, ‘is an adjective for the pitiful tripe that managements use to try to jolly along their staff.’ He cites examples: ‘Passionate about Sandwiches’ or ‘Our philosophy is ... ’ in cases where a mission statement about road-sweeping or paperclip production may follow.
My correspondent comes up with his own suggestion for the right word: ‘bullshit’.
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