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In Praise of Buzzwords

Like Shakespeare, new media loves new words. Roger Horberry explains what business can learn from the Bard.

Like Shakespeare, new media loves new words. Roger Horberry explains what business can learn from the Bard.

Say what you like about Shakespeare, he was a bit tasty when it came to coining new words (or "neologisms", as any dictionary head will tell you). Estimates vary, but it seems somewhere between 1500 and 2000 words still in use were either invented or popularised by Shakespeare - a contribution to English unequalled by any other author.

There's a surprising parallel between Shakespeare's special talent for word coinage and the blossoming of new words in the online world. Like today's army of anonymous new media neologisers, Shakespeare explored and exploited the resources of language to their limit. He changed nouns to verbs (such as film and champion), verbs to nouns (dawn, scuffle), verbs to adjectives (hush) and adjectives to nouns (accused) in a process called "functional shift". He added prefixes and suffixes (eventful, remorseless) and subtracted parts of words by a process known as "back formation" (impede from impediment). He gave new meanings to old words (housekeeper was originally the landlord of a theatre) and compounded existing words to create new ones (birthplace, eyeball, cold-blooded, soft-hearted). In short, he played fast and loose with every convention of English and won hands down.

So far, so interesting, but why am I telling you this? Simple: we're still at it. This forging of new words, whether for culture or commerce, is essential to the ongoing health of our language, although over the years plenty of people have disagreed. In the eighteenth century Alexander Pope petitioned Queen Anne to ban the creation of new words, but to no avail. In the nineteenth century Noah Webster produced his eponymous dictionary with the explicit aim of fixing US English forever, but inevitably failed. Even the great Dr. Johnson started out wanting to define the limits of English with the creation of his dictionary, but ended up realising that was neither possible nor desirable.

And that's my point, really. Neologisms - what in a business context are often belittled as buzzwords - are inevitable. Language simply won't sit still, no matter how much we might want it to. In the Elizabethan era the engine for change was the adoption of English as the language of learning, combined with the rise of printing as a channel for disseminating new words. And what words they were, with plenty still to be found in the mouths and minds of web folk the world over. The word advertising first appeared in Measure for Measure, but Shakespeare used it in the sense of "to be attentive to", and it didn't catch on - proof that only the most useful neologisms make the grade. More successful were backing, in the sense of offering support or aid, from Henry IV pt 1 (the same play that gave us forward, as in send ahead), employer, as in one who hires (from Much ado about Nothing), manager (from Love's Labour's Lost), marketable (from As You Like It), negotiate (Much Ado About Nothing again) and secure (from Henry IV pt 2).

Today, thanks to the immediacy of electronic communications, we're witnessing a new golden age of coinage, a fantastic flowering of words and phrases to describe new ideas or reshape old ideas into novel forms of language. The big difference is that in the 21st Century a word doesn't rely on face-to-face usage or the slow spread of literature to gain acceptance. If a word works, the internet provides it with a global audience overnight.

And what of today's new words? These lexical newcomers might at first hearing seem ghastly but more often than not they're really rather good. A word like newbie is short, accurate, memorable and effective, while firewall is positively poetic. Buzzwords like these work because they answer a pressing need and do it with more economy than their longhand alternatives. Take the neologism outsourcing. You may wince, but there is no simple alternative way of communicating the idea of acquiring goods or services from a source outside an organisation. No one wants to write that out longhand every time they refer to the phenomenon of outsourcing. One hearing is enough - people understand. They may groan, but they understand. It works, job done.

Don't get me wrong - I'm as prone to buzzword fatigue as the average language fan, but I can't help acknowledging their utility. It seems to me the golden rule should be that there's nothing wrong with using a buzzword, neologism or whatever you want to call it, provided it's the most appropriate and creative word to use at that moment. It's both pointless and misguided to rail against new additions to the language of business and culture, so why not take the opposite view and see them for what they are - creative additions to our language? In short, new words are good. Shakespeare understood this, just as anyone who has ever heard a choice word or phrase and surreptitiously slipped it into his or her personal word stock knows. Neologisms that make the grade succeed because they give our language clarity and economy. Who could argue with that?

About the author

Roger Horberry is a freelance writer for business and a member of 26 www.26.org.uk. He has written a chapter in The Bard & Co: Shakespeare's Role in Modern Business (edited by Jim Davies, John Simmons & Rob Williams) published by Cyan Books, £12.99 from bookshops and online retailers.