Stephen Colbert and Philosophy - Aaron Allen Schiller [37]
Original Wordality
There are other new words that have appeared in the Colbert Report for which it’s even more difficult to determine meanings. These are the words that appear next to Colbert at the start of the show. It’s more difficult to determine meanings for these words because they are removed from both a sentence and a conversation, and thus contain very little context. All we have to go on in determining what they mean is that the words refer in some way either to Colbert or the Colbert Report, and any features of the shared history that we have with Stephen Colbert to which the component parts or roots of the words allude. As you will recall, we used these cultural connections when we figured out what “wordanista” meant, but now that will be all we have to go on (as we don’t have a full sentence from which to piece together meaning). Some examples of these words are “Lincolnish,” “superstantial,” “megamerican,” “grippy,” and “freem.”
Of these examples I have just given, “Lincolnish” seems to wear its meaning most clearly on its sleeve. While “Lincoln” is not an uncommon last name, there is only one Lincoln who is well known in the culture in which this term appears—the sixteenth President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln. The second part of this term, “ish,” is common in English, the language used by Colbert when he’s not making up new words. I say that it is his language when he’s not making up new words, because it isn’t clear that the new words are English. Certainly the new words are not in the lexicon yet, even though some or all of them may be integrated into the English language in the future.
As you, the reader of this article, know (because reading this article requires that you be fairly competent at understanding English), when “ish” is added to a noun, the new, composite word is used to refer to something other than an instance of the original noun which is similar to that noun in relevant ways. A common example is “sheepish.” We say someone is sheepish when that person is a bit ashamed of what they are saying or doing, because we know in our gut that sheep are frequently a bit ashamed of what they’re saying or doing. So, we can now be relatively sure that “Lincolnish” means “like Abraham Lincoln.” The case of “megamerican” seems to work much like “Lincolnish.” The word directs our attention to the existing words “mega” and “American,” and we are able to easily conclude that what the word means is American to such an extreme degree that the biggest possible scale of measurement of American-ness has to be employed.
“Freem” is the new Colbert word which is most difficult to define. I can offer only conjecture about its meaning. The way this word sounds when you say it out loud, it appears to be an amalgam of the words “free” and “meme.” So, it seems to me that “freem” means something like “freedom which spreads from individual to individual and situation to situation from mere contact.” The way that this might refer to the Colbert Report is that the show writers are implying that the show is a freem, or that it contains freems, and that by watching the show, freedom will in some way be transferred to the viewers of the program. For a different (and therefore wrong) interpretation of “freem” see Chapter 16 in this volume.
That we have trouble trying to identify the meaning of these words should not be seen as a problem for this view of determining meaning, but rather as support for it. This is because, if a large part of what fixes the meaning of a sentence (and its parts) is the context it appears in, when we have very slim or incomplete contexts, we should expect there to be vagueness and doubt about the meanings of the words. To have a better idea about what “freem” means, we will have to wait for Colbert to actually use the word, and, in doing so, place it in a context.
Conclestions
You might now be thinking that I have only shown that, given that there are literal meanings of words, we can determine the meanings