Word Spy: The Word Lover's Guide to Modern Culture.(Book Review)

Word Spy: The Word Lover's Guide to Modern Culture. Paul McFedries. New York: Broadway Books, 2004.

As I write this, Senator John F. Kerry--the Democratic Party's Seabiscut candidate--is poised to compete against George W. Bush in the November 2004 presidential election. According to the punditocracy, this could be another unusually close contest. Bush has a veritable lock on the Nascar dad vote, whereas Kerry is a sure thing among soccer moms. Sadly, the outcome will have a much to do with how spinnable the situation in Iraq becomes, and which side has the better oppo unit to respond to the other candidate's speakos, character frags, and attack ads, even in the blue states.

If this makes any sense to you at all, it is because we live amidst a "neological frenzy" (16). According to Paul McFedries, author of Word Spy: The Word Lover's Guide to Modern Culture, not since the Elizabethan age, when Shakespeare alone coined 1,500 words, have so many new words and phrases entered our language. As one might imagine, technological innovation and the Internet have done much to fuel this "new word explosion" (16).

Word Spy is geared toward a popular audience, not a scholarly one. Although McFedries has authored more than 40 books, many are in the Complete Idiots Guide series. Nevertheless, this lively and intelligent book may interest serious analysts of popular culture, not least because McFedries catalogues thousands of "new words"--that is, words that do not appear in most general dictionaries, that originated in the past 25 years, and that have "a track record in the language. This means [they have] to have appeared in at least three different media publications, in at least three different articles, written by at least three ...