Word Fugitives – Review

Barbara Wallraff. Word Fugitives: In Pursuit of Wanted Words. New York: Collins, 2006. Print.

First, I tell my students, define the key terms. A word fugitive is word or phrase that does not (apparently) exist in a language, but ought to because the experience is common. In this case, the language is English, which already has a far larger vocabulary than any other language.

Wallraff nevertheless claims that there are hundreds of such fugitives like a name for the habit of opening a refrigerator out of boredom or when there are multiple waiting lines, say in a bank or a store checkout, thinking that your line must be the slower or slowest.

Some of these are fun. Wallraff makes heavy use of portmanteau words—words formed by combining parts of two or more words, like the word smog, formed from smoke and fog. Some are clever, but after reading over a hundred pages, it begins to feel like déjà vu. Haven’t I heard this joke before?

For the condition of the repeat refrigerator opener there are such terms as smorgasbored, freonnui, and Walraff’s favorite, tough an adjective, fridgety. The proposed words for believing that other lines are faster include misqueue, quevetousness, or misalinement.

While some of these are funny, it seems like many of these word fugitives are abstractions or behaviors. People usually manage to coin terms that are useful or that describe concrete objects. In some cases there actually are regional terms that have yet to catch on more widely. In some parts of the North American snow belt the frozen lumps of snow and ice that accumulate in wheel wells are called snards, but this has not caught on everywhere. Irishmen call plastic bags caught in tree limbs witches knickers, but this might not catch on in America because NPR or someone like them finds the term offensive.

One item struck me as being a little silly, at least if you know some French. Someone asked for a terms to describe the following: “Often I’ve heard of something for the first time—a food, a place, a person—I start hearing about it everywhere.” (33) Wall raff cited attention surplus disorder and déjà new, an obvious play on déjà vu.

Word Fugitives tells us that shortly after this was coined in a magazine, pop singer Dion came out with an album called Déjà Nu. Clever, except that the French word nu means “naked,” from the same root as the English nude. Already naked? I don’t know…I think that fugitive is still at large.

Among her lists of proposed fugitives, Wallraff does include a few handfuls of little used words that are actually recorded in serious references like the Oxford English Dictionary. Such words include peenge (to complain in a whining voice), paradiorthosis (a false correction), and nudiusterian (having to do with the day before yesterday). I am pretty sure I have heard someone use peenge before.

I came across a few expressions that Wallraff was seeking which, I believe, do exist already in our language. For example, she was looking for a term for when a person believes that two coincidental events are related. As a high school English teacher who attempts to introduce logic, that sounds very similar to the post hoc fallacy.

Honestly, most of these abstractions and conditions do not need a single word or phrase. Who really cares if there is no word to describe fridge boredom?

At time, I confess, I was near to getting bored with the book. Some ideas were downright stupid to me, like a whole lot of made-up words beginning with the letter x just so there would be more words beginning with that letter. Dr. Seuss’ On Beyond Zebra was far cleverer and sillier (at least it was when I discovered it in first grade).

But then, some entry would catch me a certain way and I would begin to laugh—once I could hardly contain myself. Word Fugitives is a lot like many joke books. It can be worth reading one, enduring pages of lame jokes for the half dozen or so that will make your friends laugh out loud when you share them. Ah, the serendipity!

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