The Simpsons episode “Lisa the Iconoclast” aired during season seven of the show that’s now been renewed for seasons 33 and 34, which will take it to (at least) an unbelievable 750 episodes. Almost every episode from that period is now a cultural classic in one way or another. But this one is special for word lovers in particular because it’s when we learn the history of Springfield’s pseudo-aphoristic town motto, “A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man.” It’s an inspiring saying of town founder Jebediah Springfield. One out-of-towner remarks that “embiggen” isn’t a real word people use and is rebuked that “it’s a perfectly cromulent word.”
As Simpsons obsessives have discovered, the way “embiggen” and “cromulent” were conceived is that writers Dan Greaney and David X. Cohen were asked to neologize fake words that sound like real words the characters might believe are actual parts of broader English vocabulary outside of Springfield, to show what a backwater it is.
Later, it was discovered that unbeknownst to Greaney and the Simpsons writers room, “embiggen” had already been used as a gag a century earlier. In the 1884 A Medium of Intercommunication for Literary Men, General Readers, Etc., words writer C. A. Ward had sarcastically covered “barbarous” new verbs replacing good ones like “renew,” writing that “fresh slang coming up destroys old slang, and it is this we must look to, and not to grammarians, to rid the dictionaries of the jargon that ‘neweth every day.’” And so, he joked about a Greek word for “magnify,” which could be transliterated as “to make great or embiggen, if we may invent an English parallel as ugly.” Nothing new under the sun.
Because dictionaries retain an image of don-like tweediness, it is supposed to represent some kind of victory for edginess or linguistic populism when one of “our” words winds up in “their” space. So it made splashy news that, in 2021, the lexicographers at Dictionary.com added “embiggen” and “cromulent” among a list of 600 or so new words they were accepting. “A noble spirit embiggens the new batch of Dictionary.com words,” ran the A.V. Club headline, as just one example of the internet virality. Also on the new Dictionary.com list: “supposably,” “BIPOC,” “deepfake,” “doomscrolling,” and “sponcon” (for “sponsored content”).
I have no particular objection to any of these words, for the record — except “supposably.” But I am enough of a Simpsons obsessive to also know that “embiggen” comes from an episode when it was considered funny to have Moe the bartender knock Lisa as a killjoy by charging her with “herophobia” for trying to destroy Jebediah Springfield’s reputation. The dictionary didn’t add that neologism, which might now be apt. I’ve been around culture wars long enough to know why it was funny in 1996 for Lisa’s teacher Ms. Hoover to fail her essay exposing Springfield as a fraud by saying, “This is nothing but dead white male bashing from a PC thug.” Nothing new under the sun.
I’ve also been around long enough to remember that Merriam-Webster already added “embiggen” two years ago and got just as much coverage. So I’m not buying that I should be shocked a dictionary got some viral attention by deigning to know about The Simpsons, and you shouldn’t either. You shouldn’t clutch pearls at the cry for online attention. Dictionary.com isn’t even a supposably cromulent reference work. Just disregard it as the actual work of a dictionary. It’s stunt lexicography.
—By Nicholas Clairmont
