Coined by Chance

Abstract

Among the many of ways in which words are born, one seldom receives its due: happenstance. Sources of new words can be fluky. Many new words have resulted from misprints (derring do), befuddlement (decider), and mispronunciation (quark). Proust noted how many terms that French speakers took pride in pronouncing correctly resulted from “blunders made by Gaulish mouths, mispronouncing Latin and Saxon words.” Literary scholar Walter Redfern called such coinage-by-mishap blunderful. Linguists are keenly aware of the role mishaps can play in word creation. In Aspects of Language, Dwight Bolinger and Donald Sears discussed how often simple mistakes fertilize our lexicon. As in the natural world, such mistakes – typos, misspelling, mistranslation – have been a key source of evolutionary change.