Tag Archives: new words

Simpsons-Speak

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Pop culture is responsible for many sayings that people quote: “Inconceivable!” “He’s dead, Jim!” “Make it so!” “You’ve been chopped.”

(Of these, “Inconceivable!” and its follow-up, “I do not think that word means what you think it means,” are perhaps the most useful in everyday conversation. But I digress.)

But if you ask me (no one did), the best source for memorable quotations would have to be The Simpsons, which today airs its 800th episode. Some of these bon mots have even made it into our family vocabulary.

Bart was on his way home from Sunday School when Marge admonished him for saying hell. Bart’s reply? “I sure as hell can’t tell you we learned about hell unless I say ‘hell,’ can I? Hell, hell, hell, hell!” Now, whenever one of us says “hell,” the other jumps right into the quote.

Then there’s Homer. After a lesson on fire safety, He sings, “When a fire starts to burn/There’s a lesson you must learn./Something, something, then you’ll see/You’ll avoid catastrophe. D’oh!” Dan forgets lyrics often, and some older songs I just don’t know. We often end up saying, “Something, something. D’oh.”

(I understand that in the Simpsons’ scripts, “D’oh” is indicated by “annoyed grunt.” But I digress.)

One particularly important exchange for Dan and me starts when the characters are standing around the statue of Jebediah Springfield, the town founder and local hero. The legend on his statue reads, “A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man.” Someone inquires whether “embiggen” is a real word. Mrs. Krabappel, the teacher, replies, “It’s a perfectly cromulent word.”

(I would think the meanings of “embiggen” and “cromulent” should be clear from context, but let’s take a look at Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary, where both are defined. “Embiggen” means “make bigger or more expansive.” And M-W defines “cromulent” as “acceptable; satisfactory.” What’s even more amazing is that autocorrect didn’t balk at either one when I typed them just now. But I digress again.)

(Just as a digression (to a digression), Dan and I use “embiggen” all the time, almost daily. Because of my various injuries and operations, I can’t climb the stairs to where the bedroom is. So we bought a chair that expands into a single bed and collapses back into a chair. I ask Dan to embiggen the bed in the evening and dis-embiggen it in the morning. But I digress some more.)

Then there’s Grampa Simpson. He has a technique for answering intrusive questions. He goes into a totally irrelevant soliloquy. Like this:

“Like the time I caught the ferry to Shelbyville. I needed a new heel for m’shoe. So I decided to go to Morganville, which is what they called Shelbyville in those days. So I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time. Now, to take the ferry cost a nickel, and in those days nickels had pictures of bumblebees on ’em. ‘Gimme five bees for a quarter,’ you’d say. Now, where were we? Oh, yeah. The important thing was that I had an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time….”

(Sociolinguist Suzette Haden Elgin recommended this tactic as well. She could also shut down awkward conversations by saying, “Well, you can’t tell which way the train is going by looking at the tracks.” But I digress yet again.)

Let’s finish with Marge. In one episode, she went away for a self-care day, indulged in a bubble bath, and called room service:

“I’d like a banana fudge sundae. With whipped cream! And some chocolate chip cheesecake. And a bottle of tequila!”

(We don’t use this one in conversation, but once when I had to write something on self-care, I worked it in as an example of what self-care isn’t. But I digress even more.)

Thus has our vocabulary been enriched by a cartoon show. (I also like the episode in which Ned Flanders complains to Principal Skinner that he doesn’t want Darwinian evolution taught at school, and Skinner replies, “You mean Lamarckian evolution?” It doesn’t fit into any conversation I’ve ever had, but it cracks me up every time. And this is my final digression for this week.)

These Are Words?

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No, I’m not going to complain about neologisms such as “yeet,” which are actually useful, even if I do have to look them up in the Urban Dictionary. Instead, I have some things to say about recent words I’ve encountered that make little sense to me or that I have misread as something else entirely. I find these words perplexing, for a variety of reasons.

One I encountered recently is “sewist,” which is easy to mistake for “sexist” if you’re skimming (or typing, if you’re very bad at it). I think it is an attempt to replace the possibly-problematic-gender-wise “seamstress.” You can’t just retrofit it to “seamster,” I guess, in the way that “actress” has been. (I must admit that it is still difficult for me to refer to Angelina Jolie or Maggie Smith as an actor. I suppose I’ll get used to it, though it’s going to take me a while. But I digress.) There’s always “sewer,” I suppose, though that’s as unlikely to catch on as “sewist,” probably because, pronounced differently, it already has an entrenched (sorry not sorry) meaning.

I must point out that there is another, already existing, term that conveys the same content in an equally nonsexist manner: “fabric artist.” Admittedly, it does have the drawback of being two words and four syllables, which is difficult for speakers to handle in this fast-paced modern world. But the term also conveys the idea of someone skilled in making beautiful things (as well as useful ones) in a way that “sewist” just doesn’t.

The next candidate for Worst New Word is “sanism,” which I thought at first was shorthand (or a mistyping) of “satanism.” After reading further in the passage, I realized that “sanism” was one of the many “-ism” words that refer to offensive, discriminatory practices – like ageism, sexism, lookism (not kidding), racism, colorism (which is different from racism), ableism, and the like.

“Sanism” refers to the oppressive dominance of sanity, over what or whom, I’m still trying to determine. Surely not insanity, which is, these days, a legal term (not guilty by reason of) and not one that should be used to refer to people with mental health issues. Perhaps it refers to the presumption that everyone is sane until proven otherwise, which sounds to me like another class (sorry not sorry) of privilege.

Perusing Merriam-Webster’s words that were added to the dictionary in 2021, one comes across “copypasta” (which does not refer to stealing recipes); “teraflop” (which is not an unsuccessful dinosaur); “halotherapy” (which is not a religious term); “hard pass” (which is not a football term); and “gig worker” (which is not someone who spears frogs).

Of course, none of these may catch on the way “truthiness” did after it was introduced on The Stephen Colbert Show. It was just so darn useful, and resonated with those observing the political scene in 2020, when M-W noticed the word.

One other word that has been resurrected this year, though not with its previous meaning, is “oobleck.” This, of course, was coined by the illustrious Dr. Seuss (one of my first (and still) all-time favorite authors) in Bartholomew and the Oobleck, where it referred to a kind of goopy green snow. Now it means a substance made from cornstarch and water that behaves like a solid at times and like a liquid at others.

Personally, I approve. I think Dr. Seuss would have been proud. Or chuffed, if he were British.

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