Predictionary: experiments in verbal creativity

MIKHAIL EPSTEIN "PreDictionary. Experiments in Verbal Creativity". Mikhail EPSTEIN is a literary scholar and critical thinker and Professor of Cultural Theory at Emory University (Atlanta, USA). PreDictionary is a dictionary of would-be words that are designed to fill gaps in language and generate new concepts and meanings. Focused on the creative potential of a neologism and a dictionary entry, this book is dedicated to both poetry and poetics. The main part of the book includes 150 entries in 14 thematic sections. All new words are supplied with definitions and examples of usage. "Amazing collection of coinages. Much more impressive than the pop proposals of Faith Popcorn. And what a wonderful word is "predictionary"!" --Allan METCALF, Professor of English at MacMurray College and Executive Secretary of the American Dialect Society.

What is the minimal genre, the elementary unit of literary creativity? Not an aphorism or a maxim, as many would immediately suggest. The unit of verbal creativity is a neologism -- a single word as a "quantum" of creative energy. A new word reveals in the most concentrated form the same qualities of invention as longer literary texts, such as a poem or a novel.
 
Various types of neologisms perform various linguistic and social functions: technical terms, trademarks and brand names, political slogans, expressive coinages in literature and journalism... Authors like Lewis Carrol or James Joyce wove neologisms into the fabric of their writing. However, a neologism should be recognized as a self-sufficient text. I call this genre of producing single words lexicopoeia, from the Greek lexis, 'word' (from legein, 'say') and poiein, 'to make or create'. Lexicopoeia means word-composition, word-formation. It is a literary genre of its own, the poetry of a single word.
 
Roots, prefixes, suffixes and other word-building blocks (morphemes) provide the material for lexicopoeia. Not any combination of morphemes would make a new word, just as not any combination of words would make an aphorism, a poem or a story. A lexicopoem is the atomary text with its own idea, imagery, composition, plot, and relations/references to other words. That's what makes lexicopoeia an art rather than random morpheme-blending. The meaning of a lexicopoem cannot be mechanically derived from the separate meanings of its morphological components.
 
The word "lexicopoeia" is an example of the very genre it designates; it is also a fresh coinage never used before in English or any other language; you won't find it in any dictionary or web source.

The preceding sentence was written in 2003 when I first put my collection online on my web page at Emory University. By June 2011, searching for "lexicopoeia" would yield 1920 web pages. Among other words I first posted on various websites in 2003, searching for "predictionary" now yields 26,500 pages; for "protologism," 7,670; "happicle.", 6720; "lovedom," 117,o00; "cerebrity," 309,000; "syntellect," 127,000; and "dunch," 254,000 pages. The words "sovok" (Homo Sovieticus) and "metarealism" (an artistic and literary movement) that I introduced into Russian in the 1980s, have migrated into English and now yield 515,000 and 12,700 web pages, respectively. Words, like books, have their own fate. The Web is a perfect tool to track down word origins and spread.