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Prominent in the second group is Bill Clinton, who uses formal English with scarcely a flaw. In a middling category are those who attended Yale but didn’t graduate. Examples are Vice President Dan Quayle, whose main claim to fame was his imaginative spelling of potato when presiding at a student spelling bee, and former Veep Dick Cheney, who has done little to promote Amglish except mix up a few pronouns.

Even Jacob Weisberg, the journalist who exploited his famous fellow graduates with his Bushisms books, is a Yalie. Go figure.

NEOLOGISMS ARE US

At the same time, the country was becoming entranced with the idea of making up words and phrases as well as playing loose with grammar and syntax. It didn’t matter whether the increasing laxness was accidental or purposeful. Language was becoming something to enjoy and be stylish with. Even the media, which have long prided itself by keeping up to the old rules, have joined the new game with vigor.

One of the more logical inventions is idolspize, a term promoted by the Washington Post—in a separate article—to denote simultaneously idolizing and despising a celebrity.10 Just as one word can lead to another, so can one neologism lead to another.

A year later, the paper went into a full-page orgasm over the latest word for an important female body part, vajayjay. The term apparently got its start on ABC’s Grey’s Anatomy and then got massaged by Oprah and enough other TV personalities to gain entrance into Merriam-Webster’s Open Dictionary. If the originating show had used the anatomical term instead, nobody would have noticed.

The Post chose to violate a famous language rule and use a noun instead of a verb to describe the way in which Hollywood’s Joan Collins went “swanning through the lobby of the Ritz Carlton . . . with just the right accessories.”11

Broadcasters can also play the game. NPR ran a contest to find the best neologism for an aborted sneeze. The witty winner was sniff-hanger.

ANCIENT NEOLOGISMS

Neologisms have been fun for centuries. One of the most fertile sources was Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice in Wonderland who also penned the delicious poem Jabberwocky, which still charms as much as it did in 1872. It is the source of our current word chortle. Carroll became an early supporter of less formal English, a thought that might cause him to chortle in his grave at the sight of it today. The first quatrain of Jabberwocky set the tone:

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:

All mimsy were the borogoves,

And the mome raths outgrabe.

The poem is a fine example of portmanteau words, those that combine at least two words. A common example is smog (smoke and fog). Carroll’s slithy mixes slimy with lithe, and mimsy combines miserable and flimsy. It’s the same game that Sarah played when she melded skirmish and squirm. Who doesn’t enjoy this kind of wordplay?

Many neologisms simply appear and then hang around long enough to eventually become part of the linguistic woodwork. One of them is nother. No, that’s not Old English for mother. It first got shrunk from another by Geoffrey Chaucer in the fourteenth century, but that’s a whole nother story.

The rising tide of new words today raises an interesting question: are the media pushing them primarily to attract and hold their declining audiences or to put a pretty face on the new flexibility of their own standards? Or both? While the jury is out on that, a popular website, Urban Dictionary, has been busy collecting the verbal uppers and downers for all to admire and use. The result is a series of books of the same name. Sample entries: sheeple for people who are unable to think for themselves and dot-gone for an unsuccessful Internet company.

For eighteen years, the Washington Post has run a weekly contest called Style International in which entrants compete for prize T-shirts with humorous concoctions that often defy the laws of verbal gravity.

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