Quarantinis with my quarantootsie

This pandemic has shown us some very ugly sides of human nature – and also some delightful ones. I’ve loved some of the neologisms, especially “Covidiot” (the twentysomethings who party in large groups) and “quarantinis” (martinis with lemon, honey, and an optional dose of vitamin C). We followed the recipe from the internet (minus the vitamin C), and I can now testify from experience that they are quite tasty drinks, though strong: one quarantini was more than enough for the evening. (My mother used to chant, “One martini, two martini, three martini, floor,” but that was the early sixties. She also taught me to drink a full glass of water before imbibing one.)

In idle moments, I’ve invented a few other neologisms for our current situation. (I hope people will chime in with theirs in the comments.) You have a “quarantootsie” if you’re lucky enough to be quarantined with someone you like to cuddle up with. Everyone I’ve talked to has been a bit “pandemotional” in the past few weeks (emotionally volatile – up and down depending on whether they’ve read a report on a promising vaccine or a grim forecast for next winter). And those of us who care about functioning democracy have watched in horror as heavily armed men shut down the Michigan statehouse (or spit on clerks in stores, or shot them, or . . . . ); we could call them “pandemented,” although I suspect they were already pretty crazy before the virus hit.

Most neologisms are, like the words I’ve just talked about, “portmanteau” words. Lewis Carroll first used the term in Through the Looking-Glass, when Alice asks Humpty Dumpty to explain the meaning of the poem “Jabberwocky.” She quotes the famous opening stanza to him:

            Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

            Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:

            All mimsy were the borogoves,

            And the mome raths outgrabe.

When she asks about “slithy,”, Humpty Dumpty answers, “Well, ‘slithy’ means ‘lithe and slimy.’ ‘Lithe’ is the same as ‘active.’ You see it’s like a portmanteau—there are two meanings packed up in one word.” (“Portmanteau” was the fancy word for a suitcase in the nineteenth century.)

Lots of portmanteau words are so useful that they eventually become words we take for granted: motel, smog, brunch, workaholic, or gerrymandering (Governor Gerry + salamander, which is what one of the newly created districts apparently resembled). Or blog itself, for that matter (web + log). But they’re the most fun when they still retain an electric charge of novelty: Frankenfood, mansplaining, glamping, or sarchasm (the gulf between the author of a witticism and the person who doesn’t get it). They remind us that language is always shifting and changing to fit the times; they make our ordinary speech feel fresh.

And memorable new words, along with memorable characters and scenes, are a marker often used to assess great writers. Sometimes those words are created by slamming two words together, but usually they’re a different modification of words we know. Shakespeare used about 1700 words that had never been recorded in print and probably invented over four hundred of them. Besides giving us words like “mimic,” “lackluster,” and “birthplace,” he loved minting words with the prefixes un- (“unearthly” and “unpolluted”) and over- (“overrate,” “overpay,” “overpower”).

Neologisms went out of fashion in the nineteenth century, since realistic fiction mostly relies on ordinary language, but in the early twentieth century, the rise of speculative fiction (science fiction, fantasy, alternative history) encouraged writers to invent terminology for their invented worlds. In 1984, Orwell’s Newspeak mostly simplifies language (good, better, best to good, plusgood, doubleplusgood), but he also creates words like “crimestop” (which he defined as the “faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. . . . In short, protective stupidity”). In Brave New World, there’s the drug soma, though Huxley didn’t exactly invent the word; instead, he took over a Sanskrit term for an intoxicating juice used in Vedic rituals. But he did invent a nice bit of comic fun: “zippicamiknicks,” a word for a woman’s one-piece undergarment. (I’m not surprised the term never caught on….)

For Clockwork Orange, Burgess invented an entire teen slang he called Nadsat (based on the Russian word for the suffix in thirteen, fourteen, and so forth); readers who’ve made their way through the novel will remember the irritation and exhilaration of their first encounters with words like “droogs” (Alex’s buddies or, to use a current neologism, his homies) or his desire to “tolcheck some old veck in an alley and viddy him swim in his blood.” One of the most interesting words is “horrorshow,” anglicized from the Russian khorosho, meaning “well” or “good.” By partway through the novel, it becomes a fabulously ironic word: when Alex uses the word to describe an action as good, it’s usually some event most readers do regard as a horror show.

And then there’s James Joyce. By the time he wrote Finnegan’s Wake, Joyce’s language was so complicated that very few people (including me) ever make it past the first few pages. Wake intends to explore the elusive language of dreams and drunkenness with multilingual puns, hundred-letter words, and oblique references to many mythologies. Just for fun, here’s the first two-and-a-half paragraphs, with the first hundred-letter word:

riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.

Sir Tristram violer d’amores,fr’over the short sea, had passencore rearrived from North Armorica on this side the scraggy isthmus of Europe Minor to wielderfight his penisolate war: nor had topsawyer’s rocks by the stream Oconee exaggerated themselse to Laurens Country’s gorgios while they went doubling their mumper al the time: nor avoice from afire bellowsed mishe mishe to tauftauf thuartpeatrick, had a kidscad buttended a bland old Isaac: not yet, though all’s fair in vanessy, were sosie sesthers wroth with twone nathandjoe. Rot a peck of pa’s malt had Jhem or Shen brewed by arclight and rory end tothe regginbrow was to be seen ringsome on the aquaface.

The fall (bababadalgharaghtakammirarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoor-denenthurnuk!) of a once wallstrait oldparr is retaled early in bed and later on life down through all christian minstrelsy . . . .

I do love “doubling their mumper,” though I have no idea what it means. Samuel Beckett defended Joyce’s obscurity here by calling it “a quintessential extraction of language and painting and gesture, with all the inevitable clarity of the old inarticulation. Here is the savage economy of hieroglyphics.” Was he joking? It’s hard to tell: these sentences of Beckett’s, like Joyce’s, do not seem inevitable in their clarity to me. (Quite evitable, in fact….)

So there are some high-powered precedents for our current wordplay. Tell me your favorite neologisms!