More Interesting New Words from the OED

Even though these three essays, which describe some of the new words in the OED, provide occasions for learning and even humor, I would love to see a list of the words that didn't make it. Perhaps it is like almost anything in life--you have to try hard the first time, but if you don't, there is always a later occasion. Sort of like trying to make it into the baseball Hall of Fame, except none of the words here is on steroids.

While my previous essay had more "fun" or "easy" words, this list has more unfamiliar and seemingly remote words. Let's begin with qaly.

1. Qaly. There are fewer than ten words in the OED beginning with "q-a" and this is one of them. Actually it is an acronym become a word, and the word, officially, is QALY, which stands for "quality-adjusted life year." I understand it to be a term used in cost-benefit analysis, in the prediction of the quality and benefit of life after medical or surgical treatment. It was first used in 1976 not in a medical but a legal publication. Why would lawyers be using it? Of course, to calculate a recovery in a tort lawsuit when a client was injured or sickened by some product. It is now, according to one law review article, a "widely-used" device in "health economics," even though its speculative character (i.e., how do you really calculate this?) has been pointed out by many. The debate regarding its utility will go on, but now we have it as a word. Welcome it, please.

2. When I saw the word fattoush, I knew it had to be something from the Middle East that you either ate or put on your head. Maybe both, especially if an infant is in view. In fact is is "a type of salad consisting of croutons (made of toasted pita bread--the OED spells the word "pitta") mixed with chopped tomatoes, cucumber and often other vegetables and herbs." Seems like I ate this a lot when I was in Saudi Arabia in 1993... Here is picture and recipe of this delicious-looking dish. The word was first attested in English in 1955. A footnote. There are 96,000 Google hits for 'pitta bread' [when I did the search without quotation marks] while more than ten times that many for 'pita bread' [also without quotation marks]. Why does the OED then opt for pitta as its preferred spelling in the above definition? Just as many people have lists of questions they are planning to ask God when they get to heaven, so I am making up my list to ask the celestial editors of the OED after my demise...

Here is a picture not only of fattoush, but of tons of other Lebanese foods. The names of most of these other foods haven't come into English as words yet. For example, one of the foods there pictured is sfiha. The word appears in no English dictionary I have seen, but recipes for these "delicious, exotic pizzas [which] are traditional in Lebanon and Syria" are all over the web. I guess sfiha has to wait in line for a while now before it can make it into English. Maybe the OED has a sort of "immigration quota" on words from other lands. In any case, one ought to send a copy of the first linked web page to the OED editors, and perhaps they will let another one of these words in in 2009. Better yet, why doesn't someone arrange a visitation to the offices of the OED for a "Lebanese food" day? I bet this would grease the skids towards accepting Lebanese cookery terms into "official" English....

3. Oops, I see I am getting carried away with words, again, so let's move onto entheogen. First attested in 1979, this word is meant to be a replacement term for hallucinogen and psychedelic but, like hey man, I don't think that you will get rid of the latter until all my 1960s hippies friends are blowin' in the wind. In any case, the word is a compound term meaning "containing deity," and is a plant or chemical substance taken to enhance a primary religious experience. We think most naturally of peyote in some Native American religious contexts. Actually, a friend of mine just filed a lawsuit in federal court in Oregon claiming that a substance, which contains trace amounts of a "Schedule 1 drug" (hence, prohibited), is essential for the community's religious practices. I think he will win the case.

It seems to me, however, that entheogen may be trying to do too many things as a word. If it is meant, in the first instance, to describe those substances that enhance a spiritual feeling in a religious context, that is one thing. But if it also is meant to replace some words that have valence in other contexts, I think it falls short. For example, when I think of psychedelic I conjure up a completely different picture in my mind than a Native American worship service. Psychedelic connotes to me a middle-aged men, clad in granny-glasses and tie-dyed t-shirt sporting long greasy hair, slightly disoriented through blowing his mind for 30 years, waiting for an auspicious opportunity for his next mind-blowing "trip." So, I will eagerly use the new word entheogen, but don't take psychedelic away from me. It is just laced with too many historical associations.

4. Let's close this essay with ecopolitics. This word is fascinating because it shows, in its very structure, the evolution of our language in the 20th century. Today it has everything to do with what we might call "environmentally-friendly" political decisions or programs. The web is awash with references to this idea. One book title that seems "so 90s" to me is: Ecopolitics: The environment in poststructuralist thought. I am sure that Paul Ricouer, Merleau-Ponty, and a host of other French thinkers will be paraded out in their semi-obscurity before the author argues something about taking the environment seriously. In any case, the word ecopolitics now has what you might call a "post-1970" meaning--one that takes cognizance of the modern environmental movement.

But, in fact, the word ecopolitics was coined in 1944, near the conclusion of WWII, to mean "the politics of a state as influenced by economic factors; the combination of economics and politics." The first usage will make its meaning clear: "Kjellen's systematic treatment of the state as a superindividual organism is built around geopolitics, which he envisions as a study of the state's natural environment, and around economics (ecopolitics), which is a discipline aiming to promote the self-sufficiency of the state." But notice what happened. Whereas the term ecopolitics could be used as late as 1980 to refer to the politics of the state influenced by economic factors, by the mid-1980s, the new term, which the OED lists as eco-politics, had taken over. Though eco-politics was first coined in 1970, its use has exploded in the 1990s and this decade.

Actuall, the OED seems to be of two minds as to what to do with the word. On the one hand, they are happy to have two entries, one on ecopolitics (economics) and one on eco-politics (environment) but, on the other hand, the editor, in introducing the words, says that perhaps econopolitics would be an unambiguous referent for the economic-related word. I, unlike Michael Vick, have no dog in this fight, and I will simply state the issue.

Oh my, I see I am out of space, and I still have about five words to go--in the next essay.

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