I don’t speak German but I love German loan words. It is in this spirit that I am coining these two neologisms, speicherschmerz & speicherfreude. They translate literally as ‘memory pain’ and ‘memory joy’ respectively.

I hope that they can capture that awful pain of searching through one’s brain for the particular Simpsons’ episode that someone has quoted and conversely the joy of getting the reference, the more obscure the better.

eg.

“Damn this speicherschmerz, where the hell have I heard ‘Purple Monkey Dishwasher’ before?”

“Ah, such sweet speicherfreude, that’s from The Simpsons episode where Bart gets the teachers to go on strike.”

 ”The word ‘belief’ is a difficult thing for me. I don’t believe. I must have a reason for a certain hypothesis. Either I know a thing, and then I know it – I don’t need to believe it.”

Carl G. Jung

All knowledge is hypothetical in nature and hypotheses lend themselves far more readily to change upon receiving new evidence than the notion of belief .

The only arena in which belief should be applied is self-belief. This is because we are almost never objective in analyzing evidence about ourselves. We form beliefs, often negative, and seek evidence to concord with our conclusion.

However, if we form a postive belief about ourselves in spite of all the perceived evidence, that belief affects our actions, habits and thinking and hopefully becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.

The only question that remains is how big dare you dream?

I was at a John Butler Trio concert recently and he mentioned that a quote had stuck in his mind from a video he saw on YouTube of a speech given by Martin Luther King.

The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in a period of moral crisis maintain their neutrality

It was originally said by JFK paraphrasing Dante’s ‘Inferno’. It is sometimes quoted as being the ‘hottest fires’ but more apt would be ‘the darkest places in hell’ as incisively argued by one reader:

In Canto III of Inferno, Dante and Virgil just pass the gate of Hell when they see a horde swatting at wasps and flies, their faces streaming with the blood of stings. Virgil explains (in Longfellow’s translation) that these are the “sorry souls of those who lived without disgrace and without praise” — those who did not take a side in some great moral conflict. Some are people who stayed neutral or otherwise abdicated responsibility for choice (one may in fact be a pope who abdicated); some are angels who refused to take a side in the war in Heaven and have been cast out.It’s not a “hot” place; heat in Dante is about passion, and these folks exactly lack passion.

It could be argued that, though not hot, theirs is an especially ignoble situation in Hell. Virgil tells Dante that the damned long to cross the river, even though it leads to their torment, because they have just enough divinity left in them to long for divine justice. These cowardly neutrals don’t even get justice. They are barely inside Hell, and not allowed justice; their stings are like anticipation unanswered.

I don’t believe in hell, but I believe in the metaphor. The last thing that this world we live in should evoke from us is neutrality.

Heterodoxy includes “any opinions or doctrines at variance with an official or orthodox position”. As an adjective, heterodox is used to describe a subject as “characterized by departure from accepted beliefs or standards” (status quo). The noun heterodoxy is synonymous with unorthodoxy, while the adjective heterodox is synonymous with dissident.

From Dictionary.com

Heterodox comes from Greek heterodoxos, “of another opinion,” from hetero-, “other” + doxa, “opinion,” from dokein, “to believe.”

ses·qui·pe·da·li·an /ˌ
Pronunciation[ses-kwi-pi-dey-lee-uhn, -deyl-yuhn]

–adjective Also, ses·quip·e·dal Pronunciation[ses-kwip-i-dl]

–noun

[Origin: 1605–15; < L sésquipedālis measuring a foot and a half (see sesqui-, pedal) + -an]

Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1)

Based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2006.

Perhaps the ultimate ironic word, and their aren’t too many words that are ironic in of themselves. We wonder why words like onomatopoeia don’t sound like the thing they’re describing or why monosyllabic takes so long to say. Well sesquipedalian is a word that wears its meaning on its proverbial sleeve. Dating back to 1615, from Latin, meaning: “words a foot-and-a-half long”, use it in a joke who probably only you will get.

ret·ro·nym [re-truh-nim]

–noun

[Origin: 1990–95, Americanism; retr(o)- + -onym]

A retronym is a type of neologism coined for an old object or concept whose original name has come to be used for something else, is no longer unique, or is otherwise inappropriate or misleading. The term was coined by Frank Mankiewicz [1] and popularized by William Safire [2] in 1980 in the New York Times. Many of these are created by advances in technology. However, a retronym itself is a neological word coinage consisting of the original noun with a different adjective added, which emphasises the distinction to be made from the original form.

From Wikipedia.org

I like this word not only for it’s self-referential quality (like the ultimate: ‘sesquipedalian‘), but also because it is about the exacting nature of language itself. The need to coin neolgisms with the arrival of new technologies and make new distinctions so we can at least attempt to have our language describe an occurrent reality.

I’d like to propose the following neologism if I may:

Wepple.

It is a portmanteau of ‘Web’ and ‘Kipple’.

Kipple was the word introduced by Phillip K. Dick in ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep’ to signify:

useless objects, like junk mail or match folders after you use the last match or gum wrappers of yesterday’s homeopape. When nobody’s around, kipple reproduces itself. For instance, if you go to bed leaving any kipple around your apartment, when you wake up the next morning there’s twice as much of it. It always gets more and more.
- I see.
- There’s the First Law of Kipple, “Kipple drives out nonkipple.” Like Gresham’s law about bad money. And in these apartments there’s been nobody there to fight the kipple.
- So it has taken over completely. Now I understand.
- Your place, here, this apartment you’ve picked – it’s too kipple-ized to live in. We can roll the kipple-factor back; we can do like I said, raid the other apartments. But -
- But what?
- We can’t win.
- Why not?
- No one can win against kipple, except temporarily and maybe in one spot, like in my apartment I’ve sort of created a stasis between the pressure of kipple and nonkipple, for the time being. But eventually I’ll die or go away, and then the kipple will again take over. It’s a universal principle operating throughout the universe; the entire universe is moving toward a final state of total, absolute kippleization.

-Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Phillip K. Dick, 1968

Wepple is the useless junk that accumulates and reproduces itself on the web or on your computer. Old emails that should have been instantly deleted, shortcuts to files that no longer exists, backups of backups, abandoned registry entries, empty folders. As digitization of information and access to the internet increases, so does wepple, exponentially.

Spam, pointless flash movies, youtube videos of incredulous banality, abandoned webpages, useless flamefests, and all the inbox fillers you can imagine.

Wepple Wepple Everywhere,
How I weep were you rare.

-Wepple, Illusive Mind, 2007