Know your English
“‘Think up’ ‘think through’ (A. Nagpal).”
“‘Think up’ means ‘produce by thought, devise.’
I must think up a way of getting out of this place.
He has thought up a plan for eradicating malaria.
‘Think through’ means ‘reffect fully upon.’ When you think through something, you consider it fully.
I am sorry I have not thought the problem through.
I must think through the problem and then see if I can think up a solution to it.”
“Is it good to coin words?”
“We get tired of ordinary language and occasionally coin words to express some new concept. It is a human tendency and it is done by speakers of all languages. Sometimes we do it for fun, sometimes in all seriousness. Even children coin words to the surprise of adults. When a word is coined by a writer, he does it in order to fill a semantic gap. Sometimes it is given a warm welcome, often the cold shoulder. Some coinages survive and some do not. Ruskin coined the word ‘illth’ on the analogy of ‘wealth.’ ‘Wealth’ is from ‘weal’ which originally meant ‘well-being.’ Ruskin wanted to convey the opposite of ‘well-being’ by the word ‘illth.’ ‘Commonwealth’ literally means
‘common well-being.’ From ‘well-being,’ we get the modern meaning ‘riches.’ We tend to believe that our well-being depends largely on ‘riches’. Ruskin’s coinage ‘illth’ has not survived.
When ‘mob’ was used for the first time in the 18th century, it was severely attacked by writers like Swift.
When ‘implement’ and ‘contact’ were first used as a verb about 50 years ago, teachers and grammarians came down heavily on such usage. Now few are even aware that there was a chorus of criticism against the use of ‘implement’ and ‘contact’ as verbs. We are all the time contacting someone or other to find out whether something should be implemented or not. When ‘hopefully’ was used for the first time in the sense of ‘it is to be hoped,’ there was a howl of protest. It is used in this sense by a lot of people now. But it is still looked on with disfavour by some grammarians. After mentioning the meaning ‘it is hoped,’ dictionaries add ‘disp.’ to convey that this meaning is still disputed by some. Hopefully, the new meaning will be accepted soon without any dispute.
Coinages like ‘sexploitation’ and ‘sexpot’ meaning ‘the excessive exploitation of sex, especially commercially’ have entered the dictionary but not ‘sexcitement’. Nobody can predict what coinages will survive and what not. Words are coined all the time. No living language is static. Some words die, some new words come into being and some words acquire an additional meaning or meanings. Also words with a good sense acquire a bad meaning and words with a bad meaning acquire a good meaning. That is, over a period, some words become exalted in meaning and some become degraded in meaning. Like human beings, words also have their ups and downs. More about this next week.
Published in The Hindu on July 21, 1992.