Hard on the heels of discovering that many people use balk to mean the opposite of what it means to me, I learn of an even more alarming development — belatedly, since Grant Barrett posted about it on January 16, 2006:
The meaning of “to coin (a word or phrase)” is changing and there’s a clear-cut need for some kind of disambiguation.
The new meaning of the verb, supported by any number of news articles or blog entries, seems to be “to say, especially in a noteworthy fashion” and not the older “to create a unique expression; to say something for the first time ever; to neologize.”
This article claims two fellows coined the word redonkulous, but it’s not clear which meaning of “coined” was intended. Probably the old meaning—that the word was first said, ever, by the two men in question, in which case the reporter is wrong.
A clear-cut case of the old meaning of “coined” is in this article, where the author claims Clarence Williams, the Delta-born pianist and publisher, coined the word “jazz.” Here they are citing Williams himself who made the bold claim that he used the word first, ever, which is so far unsupported by the evidence.
In this article, when Raymond Graves writes, “President Bush coined the word ‘war’ to suit and fuel his desire to attack Saddam Hussein,” it’s clear the new meaning of “coined” is intended, because, of course, the word “war” was not first said, ever, by the president of the United States and nobody sane would think so.
No doubt the expression “to coin a phrase,” tacked on after things that the speaker knows has been said before, is influencing this change in meaning.
In my own writing, I think I’ll disambiguate by using the verb “neologize” when necessary and by avoiding “to coin” altogether.
(All the article links are dead, and the first two have not been archived.) I’m sorry, but that’s a bridge too far. Others can use it however they like, but when I say “coin” I mean what it traditionally means. I try not to be the guy flailing futilely at the winds of change, I want to be au courant, but it turns out I have my limits. Here I stand; I can do no other.
How new? This shade of meaning overlaps with a fairly old usage of ‘coin’ covered in the OED. Among the phrases that appear under coin v.1 is ‘to coin a phrase’, which it says is ‘an expression commonly used ironically to introduce a cliché or a banal sentiment.’ The first quote is from 1940: ‘It takes all sorts to make a world, to coin a phrase.’ I dare say that could be pushed further back.
Given the ‘balk’ connexion, I thought you might like this. In a 1930 article in The Saturday Review, there’s a piece that joins coining and balking. ‘One thing I have always wished,’ it begins, ‘is to have gone to the Balkans… I do not mean that I have ever wished to go to the Balkans, I have wished, and still wish, to have gone to the Balkans—and come back.’ The author describes a dream in which he was in the Balkans and found himself on a train departing from a station after his luggage has fallen from the train. He had no ID papers, spoke no word of the local language or languages and had no money on him. ‘I felt,’ he writes, ‘for the first time—if I may coin a phrase—completely Balked.’,
Ah, the phenomenon where a fixed phrase is used ironically so often that all other uses of that phrase, or even of a word therein, die out.
In German I’ve encountered casual assertions that alter ego means “good friend” and frugal means its opposite.
Moving from irony to euphemism… in English I’ve encountered people seeing a quote from Roger Bacon or someone about “penetrating” the mysteries of nature and immediately proclaiming this was a blatant rape metaphor. They had never encountered the word except in the context of teh secks, and there was a whole thread full of them.
How new? This shade of meaning overlaps with a fairly old usage of ‘coin’ covered in the OED.
It doesn’t “overlap” — the latter, as mentioned in the very piece I quoted, is the presumptive source of the (mis)usage: “No doubt the expression‘to coin a phrase,’ tacked on after things that the speaker knows has been said before, is influencing this change in meaning.” When you say (or used to say, when people knew what it meant) “to coin a phrase,” you were being ironic: “I’m jokily claiming no one has ever used this cliché before.” In the new order of things, the phrase is entirely meaningless.
I do like the Balked story.
It’s phenomenal.
The OED doesn’t seem to agree, but I feel like literal coining more often refers to making counterfeiting money than to official minting, which might feed back into the metaphorical meaning.
I agree that it is not clear what users of this new sense of coin are taking it to mean, and moreover, that the origin indeed seems to be one where “a fixed phrase is used ironically so often” that some users are unaware of the unironic sense. However, I do think the original sense is probably still a lot more common. My joke about how, “Isaac Newton coined flux, and he also coined schillings,” relies on anyone’s ignorance not of the meaning of coin but on their not knowing that Newton served for many years as warden of the mint.
I was actually thinking about the Newton joke even before I got to David Marjanović’s anecdote about Bacon and “penetrating.” However, that story further reminded me of how the philosopher Sandra Harding called Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica “Newton’s Rape Manual,” as an exemplar of male hegemonic science, I suppose. (Newton was a lifelong virgin.)
As I wrote in more detail at Wordorigins, I think Grant Barrett jumped the gun in counting “President Bush coined the word ‘war’ …” as a new meaning. It’s hard to tell without the context, but Graves seems to be accusing Bush of *underhandedly* shifting the meaning of “war”, not of saying something that’s intended to be recognized as new. I think “coined” in that sentence was an error in 2005 (when it was written) and still is, and should have been changed to e.g. “twisted”.
In any case, this is not something that has caught on bigtime: the recent hits for “coined the” in COCA and Google News are overwhelmingly in the sense of creating a neologistic word or phrase. It *does* seem to have happened enough to irritate Bryan Garner, who writes in Modern American Usage (2009):
But Garner doesn’t understand that his other two examples of “to coin a phrase” are obviously the ironic use, so he’s not much of a guide. (Caution: the ironic use was entered in the OED’s 1972 Supplement, but the rest of the entry for coin, v.1 is from 1891, except for a metal-shaping sense from the 20th century.)
On the other hand: we need a term for giving a new sense to an existing word, and “coin” is sometimes pressed into service, as recognized e.g. by the Cambridge Dictionary: “to invent a new word or expression, or to use one in a particular way for the first time”. Of the top 50 hits for “coined the” returned by Google News just now, four designated existing expressions used in novel ways; two are idiosyncratic (rat poison as somebody’s catchphrase, “Venus flytrap” defense) but two are established in the language: Camelot (JFK), burnout (psychological). What else would you call the invention of a new sense for these, or for forecast (weather), unicorn (financial), mouse and cookie (computing), flux (physics), if not “coin”? Ralph Keyes in his recent book on coined words uses “recoin” for this — a self-descriptive use! If there were an established term in lexicography, I assume Keyes would have used it.
There’s also an occasional use of “coined” as a synonym for “dubbed” or “named”, as in “Knott coined the fruit boysenberry after its creator.” I don’t like this, but it’s out there.
On the fourth hand: *is* any of this really new? Grant Barrett is a professional, but that was a short impressionistic blog entry and not quantitative corpus-based research, and even professionals are subject to recency and frequency illusions. Nobody has searched COHA yet.
@ktschwarz: It sounds fine to me to talk about coining a new meaning for an existing word. However, if the direct object of coin is the word itself, rather than the meaning, that sounds less acceptable to me.
@David: It was Francis Bacon, the sexual metaphor is present in the context, and it’s been the subject of this kind of criticism since at least C. S. Lewis (!).
However, that story further reminded me of how the philosopher Sandra Harding called Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica “Newton’s Rape Manual,” as an exemplar of male hegemonic science, I suppose.
Good lord. A bit of googling turned up this Stephen Hicks page:
I’m all for feminist scholarship, but this is épater pour épater’s sake.
It was Francis Bacon
No, she was talking about Newton. See the page image at the Hicks link.
I was correcting DM’s reference to Roger Bacon. Francis Bacon is also present in the argument.
Ah, gotcha.
I remember flipping through a book of cartoons about the history of science, which I picked up in the gift shop of the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry. One cartoon gave profiles of both Francis and Roger Bacon, joking about how hard it may be to remember which of them did precisely what. I only remember one other cartoon from the book (which I did not, on the whole, find particularly funny), showing the differences between the geocentric, heliocentric, and egocentric models of the solar system—the last one with all the planets revolving around a smart-alecky looking guy’s head.
Yes, Francis Bacon, thanks. No, the context of the quote wasn’t sexual, though there may well be other places in that work – which is on Google Books or something – that use sexual metaphors. Google doesn’t find the thread, oddly.
I haven’t read anything like the whole of the Bacon thing, but what I find odd is that it doesn’t seem to have occurred to anyone that ‘hound’ is meant almost literally* – nature as a cornered hart or vixen, tracked down by the hunter with his hounds.
*I mean, not literally as in actual dogs Doing The Science – but it’s unlikely that anyone coming across the students who hound the writer by following him to the cafeteria in the modern text would picture them using dogs, whereas I think that’s likely to be the vivid image behind Bacon’s very early metaphorical use.
ETA for context, as I realise no one else has quoted it!:
‘For you have but to hound nature in her wanderings, and you will be able when you like to lead and drive her afterwards to the same place again.’
Thanks, that’s useful!
Brett, that book is Science Made Stupid by Tom Weller.
@Rodger C: I am impressed that you immediately managed to identify the book, based just on my vague, decades-old recollections!
According to Wikipedia:
Based on the Hugo, I wonder if I should give it another chance
just on the topic of (non-metaphorical) “coin” – i was recently surprised to see it in Dante (as “conio”, etc.) and i seem to recall it’s related to the word for “wedge” as in cuneiform. which i found interesting. then of course there’s french coin for corner, coign of vantage, etc.
https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/conio_%28Enciclopedia-Dantesca%29/
the phenomenon where a fixed phrase is used ironically so often …
Does that explain how “The sense development has been extraordinary, even for an adj.” [Weekley] for nice?
Quotes from etymonline
No, that’s a long, gradual shift from one meaning to the next and the next and the next and the next… there’s no sudden switch in meaning to an opposite.
They who speak, as some do in these comments, of “coining a new meaning for a word,” wreck the metaphor with mishandling — probably by failing to perceive that the word is as a token; it, and it alone, can be coined. The meaning, metaphorically the value of the word, stays the same whether you use a current word (currency) or coin a new one (coinage).
Coincidentally, I just happened to land on Hat’s review of Geoff Nunberg’s Ascent of the A-Word, which quotes from the book:
Sneer-quotes to indicate that you can’t use coined that way, I think mainly because it was a gradual shift rather than a deliberate specific creation, but also because it’s a new sense rather than a new word. I wonder whether Nunberg would have used the sneer-quotes in, say, “The term cookie was coined by web-browser programmer Lou Montulli.”
@Brett: Isaac Newton coined flux, and he also coined schillings
Do you mean “Newton coined fluxion”? (Or rather, recoined; this, too, already existed in English, but Newton invented a new sense.) The OED has Tyndall 1863 as the first citation for flux in the surface-integral sense, followed by Maxwell 1881. Most of Newton’s terminology is extremely different from what we use now.
Nope, never see the phrase “to coin a word” used in that way.
Speaking of word coinages, I am amused by the fake, though correct, Englishing in the Russian “стендапер”. As far as I know it is not used in English to refer to standup comedians. Are there examples of this in English? Maybe some French word got a similar treatment?
I just discovered the Russian word конвалюта ‘type of packaging (usually of medicines: tablets or capsules) in the form of a flat paper or plastic matrix with cells, sometimes made of two glued layers of aluminum foil; blister pack’ which is said to be derived from Latin convolutus ‘rolled, wrapped’; there’s some kind of folk-etymologizing going on there (cf. валюта ‘currency’).
I never heard “степдапер”, but -er is productive in Russian. Cf. drocher
I have heard people use standupper in connection with comedy a few times. However, the word has a completely different standard meaning in the television news business. (I have never done any kind of broadcast journalism. However, when MIT was in the news and television reporters came by to cover things on campus, the New England Cable News* crews would often come to hang out by The Tech‘s* newsroom, and we learned a lot about low-end television news work from talking to them.) In the news business standupper (also standup) is “a television broadcast in which the reporter or narrator faces the camera with the scene of the story in the background” (per Merriam-Webster).
* I find it weird that, as a publication, “The Tech” gets italics, while my feeling is that “New England Cable News” normally doesn’t. (Come to think of it, when I was a student and The Tech was flush with dot-com boom advertising revenue, the paper started branching out into other endeavors, like publishing a photography magazine. This raised a question about whether we would need to distinguish The Tech, the newspaper, from The Tech, the student organization that published the newspaper—since it was becoming possible to be involved in the organization without participating in the newspaper operations.)
I see that the author of “Science Made Stupid,” mentioned upthread, also produced a more history-or-humanities-oriented book titled CVLTURE MADE STVPID as well as one with the philologically-themed title Minims: A Knowledge of Sanskrit Is of Little Use to a Man Trapped in a Sewer. I would appreciate any insight into the minimum age at which a child with above-grade-level reading skills and interests might get anything out of Science Made Stupid.
Svrely CVLTVRE?
@Y: Yes.
Sorry. No excvse for the obviovs transcription screvvup on my part.
I find it weird that, as a publication, “The Tech” gets italics, while my feeling is that “New England Cable News” normally doesn’t.
To a copyeditor, it’s not weird at all. Rules is rules.
This raised a question about whether we would need to distinguish The Tech, the newspaper, from The Tech, the student organization that published the newspaper
Of course you would! Don’t shake the pillars of civilization!
@languagehat: I understand the conventional rules fine. It is just that, the more I think about it, the more I doubt that not italicizing “NECN” was the product of any actual interpretation of the rules at all. What says that New England Cable News is not a publication? Is their Web site* a publication? I doubt that the answers to many of these kinds of questions were decided by anybody actually thinking about how to apply and generalize the existing rules to somewhat new situations; they are more likely to be ossified continuations of how something was handled the first few times it came up, regardless of whether the conceptual issues even occurred to the early writers and editors involved.
* Lest anyone doubt my commitment to following seemingly arbitrary rules, you many take note of the fact that I never use the orthographic barbarism “website [sic.]”; it helps me a little, however, that I know exactly why the formatting I still use was, circa 1995, promulgated as the “correct” version.
Speaking of barbarisms, sic. is rather literally one, what with sic “so, thus, that way, like that” being a word and not an abbreviation in Latin… are you deliberately illustrating your own point? 🙂
(I’ve encountered people who believed it meant spelling in context.)
What says that New England Cable News is not a publication? Is their Web site* a publication?
Every style guide, and no. A publication is not some vague idea of making things public, it is whatever a style guide says it is, typically a newspaper or magazine or similar item. TV news is not a publication. A website may or may not be considered a publication; it depends on the style guide.
Speaking of barbarisms, sic. is rather literally one, what with sic “so, thus, that way, like that” being a word and not an abbreviation in Latin… are you deliberately illustrating your own point?
I had assumed he was saying [sic.] (with period) was a barbarism, but if he meant website (one word) and was unironically adding [sic.], he’s hoist with his own petard.
I would appreciate any insight into the minimum age at which a child with above-grade-level reading skills and interests might get anything out of Science Made Stupid.
I’d say ten to twelve.
Re CVLTVRE (and I also know and like that book), my favorite example in the wild is THE IEVV OF MALTA.
From now on, if asked to mark my ethnicity on a form, I’ll check “other” and write in “Ievvish”.
See here for my previous comments on the period in “[sic.].” I am not certain what style guide I got the period from (not the Associated Press; they would recommend paraphrasing if a quote from written material contained an error), but I have stuck with it, for the sake of personal consistency if nothing else.
Ah, I promptly forgot that again.
The Wiktionary and Wikipedia articles on sic don’t mention this; the Wikipedia article does state it’s short for sic erat scriptum, but nonetheless calls the period an error, except that one style guide allows you to make it a sentence of its own. (Sic.)
(Sic.)
Yes, that’s the only way it works for me, on its own.