6 Made Up Nerd Words That Made it to Common Usage, and 8 That Should

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6 Made Up Nerd Words That Made it to Common Usage, and 8 That Should

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by The Mary Sue Staff | 12:32 pm, January 24th, 2012

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Allow Us To Explain

Let me let you in on a little secret: writers like words. We like them so much. And so where you might wrinkle your nose and wonder why on earth someone might used the word "pulchritudinous" instead of "pretty," we're sitting at our desks and cackling with delight. We got to use "pulchritudinous" today. And it alliterated. But as a geek or nerd, you get introduced to new words all the time! Science fiction and fantasy are practically in the business; not just of creating new place names, which is a given; but also of making new nouns in general, new verbs, and new adjectives. And while some of those concepts might not be particularly useful outside of their fictional setting, others have, over time, been accepted wholly by the English of reality. With some of these, we've forgotten that they were ever words in fiction to begin with. And so we present six made up words that have since become inextricable from their meaning outside of their fictional origin (runners up include the very mimsy word "vorpal"), and, because we love words, eight words that we would like to say all the time and not get weird looks for (runners up include twip, shwey, slag, and every other silly, silly curse word from Batman Beyond).

Big Brother

Created by George Orwell to represent an oppressive, totalitarian society of the future that forced its citizens into a seething cauldron of conformity and obedience, Big Brother was like the great and powerful Oz, a dictatorial ruler with all the power in the world, and no one to take him down. Some readers of 1984 took this as a statement of what could happen if the government got too much power and the people it controlled just stood by and let themselves be manipulated. Under the rule of Big Brother, the world of Oceania is constantly at war, constantly monitored, and constantly expected to bow to whatever Big Brother commands. Big Brother comes up a lot when the subject of government power is mentioned, especially when people are talking about homeland security and terrorism. Under the previous president, many were upset about the reach of government surveillance, and the phrase created by Orwell for his fictional story, "Big Brother is watching," was often cited. Really, anyone upset with the sheer existence of the federal government invokes Big Brother in their conversation, despite that thing protecting us from that kind of rule known as the Constitution. And we haven't even mentioned the hit reality show named after the phrase. Even outside of politics, things remind people of Big Brother, like internet security for example. Why is this site asking for my social security number and all this other private information? Why does Facebook think I like Rachael Ray? Why are there things on Twitter that let people see I unfollowed them? How did Google know what I was thinking? But yes indeed -- we have let Big Brother into our lives. And until we stop spending so much time on the internet, watching each other on various social networks, the comparisons will also be sticking around for a while. However, in the fictional world, you could easily say that Big Brother was a source of inspiration for the dystopian world of the Capitol in The Hunger Games and the broadcast of the Games themselves. After all, what does the most recent poster read? "The World Is Watching." But at least this is fictional.

Cyberspace

The first mention of the word "cyberspace" was as a proper noun in William Gibson's 1982 short story, "Burning Chrome." The "Cyberspace Seven" was a simulator called the Ono-Sendai VII. Obviously, something this obscure wouldn't go on to define the world wide web. That began with the term's follow-up mention in Neuromancer, published two years later. In that book, it was referred to more broadly, as the root of a matrix that was behind the creation and socialization of video games. But it was still not something that could describe something as huge and widespread as the internet. While Gibson was apparently referring to a much more limited network than the internet we know and love today, some took the idea of it very seriously, ignoring the negative connotations of its use in the stories where it originated. Gibson described a "consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators," and that certainly sounds like the modern internet, but then he adds "by children being taught mathematical concepts." What he was thinking of -- thought he later said the word itself was just a convenient-sounding "buzzword" -- was something that immersed users in a virtual (read: fake) reality. Here is the rest of the passage:

A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding.

And considering how Gibson's stories took place in environments that are less than freewheeling, his "cyberspace" was not the stuff of Facebook photos, Wikipedia, or LOL Cats. It was for hackers and experts, both good and bad.

Muggle

British author J.K. Rowling used enough unique words in her best-selling Harry Potter series they could fill their own dictionary (there’s definitely a few online devoted to her vocabulary). But none has pervaded our culture quite like the word muggle. Although it’s been made popular by Harry Potter, the term has actually been around for quite some time. Rowling has said she formed the word using the British slang for an easily fooled person, which is “mug,” but the word muggle originated as a slang for marijuana use in the 1920s jazz scene. There was even a song recorded by Louis Armstrong in 1928 titled “Muggles,” which referenced this usage. It’s purely instrumental and you can listen to it here. Muggle was also used as a name for several specific characters in literature before being made famous by Rowling’s books. Author Carol Kendall named a character Muggles in her novel The Gamage Cup in 1959. Muggle-Wumps were what Roald Dahl called a family of monkeys in The Twits, a children’s book published in 1980. And also, The Legend of Rah and the Muggles by Nancy Stouffer in 1984 caused some legal trouble for Rowling when the Stouffer sued for copyright and trademark infringement in 1999. The author also wrote a book titled Larry Potter and His Best Friend Lilly. Regardless of how it was used in the past, the general public started using the word muggle in Rowling’s terms (a person lacking any magical ability or living outside the magic world) once her series hit it big. Since then, fandom and to a certain extent, the world at large, have adopted the term to referencing those outside of or lacking understanding of a particular group. It’s sort of a way for geeks to poke fun of non-geeks...for not being geeks. It’s often used by participants in geocaching to refer to people who may have stolen or vandalized a geocache (especially if they had no idea what it was). Moral of the story is, Lord Voldemort really just wanted to put an end to illicit drug use.

Robot

The idea of robots -- or mechanical humanoids -- goes back centuries, even BCE when Greeks borrowed from Crete's myths of a bronze man who guarded Europa from pirates. But the first reported use of the word "robot" is said to have come in a play by a Czech writer, Karel Čapek, who wrote the play, R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) in 1920. Though he credits his brother Josef with coining the word, it was one of the first truly modern glimpses into these fake humans, built by scientists, and their creation for the sole purpose of serving man. Originally, he wanted to refer to the androids as laboři, Latin for "workers" or "laborers," or dělňasi, which was derived from a Czech word for "workers." But ultimately, it was the word "roboti," based on the Czech word robota, which had its roots in serfdom and hard labor. By the time R.U.R. was written, it had a broader meaning of just "drudgery" and work. (And obviously, nothing to do with the caste system.) There are some questions about the word referring to unconscious, unfeeling robots who serve emotionlessly, simply performing the functions for which they were built without any protest or complaint, as opposed to having minds of their own that might object to being forced to work. It was Isaac Asimov who took that next step in 1942, when he came up with the Three Laws of Robotics, which are as follows:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 2. A robot must obey any orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. 3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Nowadays, we see robots left and right, whether they are controlled with the human mind and used for movies or they are programmed to just kind of dance around or walk up and down stairs. They've even been reduced to internet technology in the form of spambots -- things that clog up our email and social networks with things they seem to think we need. Indeed, they are the most unhelpful bots we've ever known. If we're lucky, we might get to revisit the heyday of early robots -- Chase Masterson (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine) is looking to adapt R.U.R. into a movie.

Ansible

Ursula K. LeGuin, is the author who coined the word "ansible" in 1966's Rocannon's World, and used it elsewhere throughout her books of an intergalactic setting. In fiction, an ansible is generally a necessary technological step on the way to faster-than-light travel: a device that allows for instantaneous communication across the vastness of space. In other words: faster-than-light communication. Metatextually, it's a way for authors to get around the annoyance of having to fill their "realistic" space story, already bloated with the relativistic gaps in time necessary to allow their characters to travel between solar systems, with the time needed to actually communicate with folks outside their solar system without the gaps between messages being numbered in years. Canonically, in her books, the ansible was based on discovered scientific principles that eventually, a couple generations down the line, were developed into the principles that allowed faster than light travel. As a science fiction term, it's been adopted along with its meaning by Orson Scott Card, Vernor Vinge (who first used the term "singularity" to describe the moment that artificial intelligence becomes capable of creating more advanced artificial intelligences by itself), and one of the founders of the video game studio Bungie (creators of Halo), to name but a few. And with that prominence, it is our sincere hope that when and if we ever do develop faster-than-light communication, it becomes the accepted word for it. Incidentally, if you're wondering what humanity would look like if we had the technological ability to create near-instantaneous communication venues between any two locations that human beings inhabit, just look around. With the invention of satellite technology and its combination with regular old telephones and other communication networks, we have essentially invented the ansible... we just aren't spread out enough to really need one. Now lets go colonize Mars, please.

Grok

Grok was coined by Robert A. Heinlein in the 1961 science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land. It's a word from the ancient Martian language with a number of meanings. Well, it's all one meaning to them, we're the ones who need a bunch of different options. Options like "to drink," "to understand completely," "to love," and "to be one with." According to Michael Valentine Smith, the only human raised by the sexless Martians, the act of sexual intercourse is also completely included in the meaning of grok. It is the intention of the Martians, now that they are aware that human civilization has the ability to travel to other planets, to grok humanity. Since humanity is a pretty big entity, and the Martians are all the way over on Mars, this is going to take some time. It'll probably be a few centuries, at least, before there is a Martian consensus on what do to with or about human beings. Which is good, because the last time the Martians had to pass judgement on whether they wanted to share a solar system with another sentient race, the answer was no, and they blasted the planet between Mars and Jupiter to smithereens. What planet between Mars and Jupiter? You might know it better as the "the asteroid belt." In any case, Stranger in a Strange Land was a central text of the free love movement of the 60s, and grok successfully made it out of fiction and into common parlance shortly after it was published. "Do you grok it?" was synonymous with "Do you dig it?," and, according to my Handbook of Cartoon Hippie Stereotypes, was immediately accompanied by fingersnaps or tambourine shaking, whichever was more convenient at the time. Grok still appears in most dictionaries today, under the definition "to fully know and appreciate" or "to know intuitively." We also fully support bringing back it's explicit definition. Make this happen, people.

Frak

Oh, frak. Before watching the newly revamped Battlestar Galactica, I remember seeing a comedy show making fun of the fact that the creators had gotten around censors by creating their own curse word. A curse word that sounds just enough like the real one to leave you satisfied after saying it, but far enough away that it won’t get bleeped out. I also remember thinking, “that’s genius!” Other creators (in the know) have used frak in their own shows, Veronica Mars for one, but it also has further roots in geekdom. Frak! was the title of a computer game from the 80s that featured a caveman named Trogg who would shout “frak!” whenever he ran into an obstacle. So, not much different than BSG come to think of it. Also, a little known fact (by me anyway), Frak is both a character and a curse word in the Star Wars universe as well. Frak was actually used in the original Battlestar Galactica series, although not nearly as often and it was spelled frack but the modern version used it pretty much any chance they got. Before you knew it, all the cool kids were using it. And by “cool kids” I mean, my friends who are huge geeks. But seriously, it’s a lot of fun to say and I wish more people would use it. Hell, I know if I were back in school I’d definitely try and get away with using it in class. Oddly enough, we may be taking steps in the right direction. I can’t recall hearing about a type of mineral or gas extraction by hydraulic means until very recently. It’s called hydraulic fracturing but is also known as fracking (or a frack job). I just know there was a BSG fan behind it...

Utlanning, Framling, Ramen, and Varelse

The Hierarchy of Foreignness is one of the core concepts in Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game, but it doesn't make an appearance until the second book Speaker for the Dead. See, first, humanity has to considerably violate the ideas present in the Hierarchy of Foreignness by destroying an entire sentient race, the Buggers, or Formics. Indeed, the remorse humanity feels for this act galvanizes the next few thousand years of human moral development, as we use the technological advances made during the Formic wars of Ender's Game to colonize our galaxy, always hoping that we might find another sentient species and get another chance at first contact. That's what the Heirarchy of Foreignness is all about: replacing the word "alien" with several different more useful definitions. Utlanning, the first category, describes a stranger of your own species and culture. You don't know who they are, but you share the experiences of your culture: like high school, voting on election day, or celebrating New Years on December 31st. Framling describes a stranger of your species who does not share your culture. In the time of Speaker for the Dead most individual human colonies have wildly different cultures, but in our own time a good comparison might be a person from Middle America and a person from North Korea. The two are obviously human, but might find it very difficult to find shared cultural experiences. With ramen, we get to actual aliens. Someone who is ramen is a person of another species, but is most definitely a person. More than that, they are demonstrably fully capable of communicating with human beings, and reaching understanding with human beings despite the fact that they are at least as culturally different as two framlings. They are also capable of existing peacefully with humans, although it may take much work on the part of both species to bring that existence to reality. The point is that if the species is ramen, it would be just as immoral to exterminate or enslave or harm them as it would be to exterminate or enslave or harm humans. Finally, there is varelse (pronounced with three syllables), a species with which it is impossible to communicate with, completely incapable of common ground with humanity and anyone considered ramen. A good example from another work of science fiction would be the xenomorphs of the Alien series. This does not necessarily mean that the species must be exterminated if it poses a threat to humanity and its allies. After all, terrestrial animals count as varelse, and even though we can be killed by lions we fight to keep them from disappearing from existence. The onus, and the subsequent blame or shame, is on humanity to know the ramen from the varelse, not the alien species to present itself as ramen as soon as possible in a clear and present fashion. To quote the books: "The difference between ramen and varelse is not in the creature judged, but in the creature judging. When we declare an alien species to be ramen, it does not mean that they have passed a threshold of moral maturity. It means that we have." I'd like it if we became a species that accepted the Hierarchy of Foreignness, if only because it is a system of classification that demands that we be constantly evaluating and re-evaluating the nature of humanity, striving actively to see sentience in the species around us. We name things varelse at our own moral peril, a lesson that science fiction has been attempting for years to teach us in allegories for racial/social conflict, hoping that we can manage to stop calling ourselves alien before before we actually run into some real ones. (Frankly, I'd be satisfied if Orson Scott Card himself didn't seem to designate so many of his utlannings as varelse.) On a related note, if scientists are right and dolphins are not animals but non-human persons, then there are already ramen living on earth who deserve our consideration.

Poozer

The word Poozer is one of my favorite quirky bits of the Green Lantern universe in DC Comics and can be seen as something negative or positive depending on who’s saying it to you and how. The word is mainly used by Green Lantern Corps rookie trainer, Kilowog, and originated from his home planet Bolovak Vix as a rather disparaging term. You’ll find that Kilowog uses the word to be both tough and affectionate to new recruits but also when referencing a particularly vile enemy. And that’s what makes it awesome. You see, Poozer is really a type of auto-antonym, that is, a word with multiple or opposite meanings, much like the Hawaiian “aloha” or the Italian “ciao.” And it’s for this reason I recommend its usage for almost any scenario or occasion. Jerk weaving in and out of traffic on the highway? “What a poozer!” Boyfriend/girlfriend being awesome? “I love you, poozer.” Employees not giving their all? “Get back to work, ya poozers!” Faced with an adorable animal? “You are such a poozer! Yes, you are!” Go ahead, give it a try.

Shiny and Ruttin

This blog is of the opinion that language will always need more explicit words for the sexual act, and so we applaud the attempts of Joss Whedon's Firefly to resurrect some older cursewords and bring them back into regular parlance. Like Frak and Poozer, already mentioned on this list, Firefly's unique style of cursing was implemented to get past censors. Lets face it, despite what that MPAA will tell you, adults curse in informal situations, all the frakkin' time. Even the "properly" brought up ones, but especially the ones who've spent time in the military and/or criminal classes... like most of the main characters of Firefly. The show made sure to keep their characters realistic in at least that way by cursing most foully in Chinese instead of English. And, when they wanted viewers to actually be able to understand them, by using outdated cursewords. "Gorram" is a corruption of the phrase "god damn," while "Ruttin'," is simply "rutting," a direct synonym for sex. "Shiny," however, solves another problem for science fiction writers. Considering all the different words of different levels of usage we have for what is essentially the same thing "cool, hot, bad, sick, hip, neat, nifty, boss, rad," et cetera... Who knows how many we'll have come up with hundreds of years into the future? The made up synonym for cool is one of the easiest ways to tell that the writers want you to know that we're in THE FUTURE now, and as such it's usually also either the silliest or the most annoying, depending on preference. Fortunately, "shiny" is used pretty sparingly in Firefly. Obviously your mileage may vary.