One among my several immodest ambitions is to leave behind a word or two of my own invention before departing the planet. I want to leave a precise word, a useful word, a good word, a word that absorbs a sweet bit of truth. Neologism, not socialism, is the name of my desire.
The only person I have ever met who accomplished this was the late journalist Henry Fairlie, who is credited with the word “Establishment,” usually used with a capital E. Fairlie didn’t quite invent the word — there had long been an Established Church in England, and hence a Church Establishment — but he made it immensely more widespread by applying it to power structures generally. So successful was this that the very word ” Establishment” became one of the shibboleth words of the 1960s.
My dear friend Edward Shils didn’t, so far as I know, invent any words, but used language as well and to as brilliant comic effect as anyone I have known. By appropriate little twists and turns — “tweakings,” the kids in computer science might call them — he came awfully close to the golden land of Neologia. I once described an acquaintance to him as rat-faced. “Yes,” Edward replied, with his great adjective-making power, “he is rather rodential.” He could also put a fine ironic spin on words, so that, for example, when I began to call what was formerly the University of Illinois Circle Campus (the campus in Chicago) “Vicious Circle,” Edward took it a fine stride further and never referred to it as other than “Ol’ Vish.” Linguistically imaginative as he was, he forgot, alas, to invent any new words.
New words do get invented all the time. Technological and medical invention requires them. So, too, does social science. But they seem to me, for the most part, the wrong words, or at least not very amusing words. I was in a meeting recently where, in connection with a discussion of policy, two new and fairly empty portmanteau words were introduced. The first was intermestic, meant to show the connection, in our brave new world, between the international and the domestic. The other was glocal, meant to show the connection between the global and the local. Neither seems to me to deserve a cigar, and glocal has serious problems, not only in being difficult to pronounce but in sounding awfully like cloacal (“It’s alimentary, my dear Watson”).
I’ve invented three words that I thought might have had a shot at staying in the language. I’ve used all three in my own writing, but thus far only one looks to have a chance. My first gallant entry was not a word but the phrase ” youth drag,” meant to describe all those older players — guys with sad gray pony tails or motorcycle jackets, women in their seventies in miniskirts — who try to pass themselves off as young in spirit through their garb. Youth drag — I sent it up the flagpole, as they used to say in the advertising business, but no one saluted.
I tried again with Bayarrea, my word for too much talk about the delights of living in or near San Francisco. Much of this talk is about good living, food and wine, and fine views — and I find I soon get a snootful of it, which makes me want to heave sun-dried tomatoes at anyone engaging in it. The word may have been too specialized, too particular, like W. C. Fields’s neologism squeemudgeon for a director who calls actors down for early- morning appearances but doesn’t use them until later in the day. As for Bayarrea, I did what I could: I put it out on the doorstep, but the cat refused to lick it up.
My one possible contender is virtucrat, a word I first used in an article in the New York Times Magazine and which I have actually seen others use in print. George Will has used it, with generous attribution, in his column in the Washington Post. A few years ago, Newsweek actually had a cover story under the rubric “The Virtuecrats.” They added the letter e, gave me no credit for it, and used the word not to mean, as I did, those people whose politics lend them the fine sense of elation that only false virtue makes possible, but instead those people — William Bennett and Lynne Cheney chief among them — who were stressing the need for virtue in the conduct of public and private life.
I’ve pushed hard for virtucrat over the years, but, somehow, I don’t think it is going to make it either.
I may have to settle for inventing a phrase. Thus far, I can think of only two phrases that I can lay some claim to having invented, and both are really spinoffs. One is “In for a penny, in for a pounding”; and the other is “You live and you yearn.” I’ve used both in print, and even more in conversation, but so far no call from the editor of the excellent Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. Depressing. What do you have to do around here to become immortal, anyway?
JOSEPH EPSTEIN
