What a waste. Those cheeky ladies of DailyCandy, the national style/fashion/food/trend email blast, came so close to being national linguistic heroes. But instead The DailyCandy Lexicon: Words That Don't Exist but Should, out next week, reads like the handbook of how to talk when hanging out with people you can't stand to be around.
The idea of compiling such a glossary isn't bad--kind of like Merriam-Webster's Word of the Year contest unadvisedly blown out to book form. The explosion of self-publishing via blogs and the Web has turned every shmo with a keyboard into an amateur wordsmith, making lexicography a booming cottage industry.
But with such a glut of word-spotters, the pool's been diluted with drivel. Last year's end-of-year New York Times Buzzwords feature, chronicling the way we talk--usually one of the most eagerly anticipated annual wrap-ups--was full of watered-down slop. "Astronaut diaper"? "Earmarxist"? "Vegansexual"? Save it for your Facebook wall, sister.
I'm all about new words. A unique letter assortment entering the lexicon and gaining widespread usage is reason enough for a large party. But like last year's NYT Buzzwords, DailyCandy just feels like it's trying too hard.
A few examples: "Reply-arrhea: email incontinence; an inability to stop emailing." "Guyatus: a hiatus from guys." "Laptopless: working on one's home computer while semi-clothed." Word creation should be about expanding our language for everyday use, not generating fodder for email forwards.
Some places, though, it hits. "Whor d'oeuvre: a girl who puts out before dinner" and "Nontourage: a group of undesirable sycophants" work nicely. "Cereal monogamy: a slavish devotion to one particular breakfast cereal," while a useless term, is something anyone can identify with.
But most of the time it's neither easy nor desirable to identify with this gaggle of Gawker wannabes. Instead the book just lends credence to crotchety old codgers who bitch that they can't understand a word young people say nowadays. With a lexicon like this, who'd want to?
The DailyCandy Lexicon launch party: Wed., July 9, 6pm. Free. Robin's Bookstore, 108 S. 13th St. 215.735.9600. www.robinsbookstore.com
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1. Grant Barrett said... on Jul 1, 2008 at 04:31PM
“The difference between the NYT piece, which I wrote, and the Daily Candy factitiousness, is that I don't make up the words I include on my annual NYT list. Somebody else coins them, a bunch of people use them, I find them, research them, try to determine that they have some kind of decent level of currency, and then I define them. As I indicated in the piece, the ones on my list were were substantiated as being used by more than one person, as being the product something other than a marketing effort, and as already having a fair bit of lifespan. If that's not enough, then nearly every dictionary is a failure, since that's more or less the core of the inclusion criteria that they all use.”