About 35 years ago there was a professor of linguistics at Drew University: Roger Wescott, who happened upon the slang word “oogly” (or at least said he did; not a whole lot of other people seem to have heard of it). “Oogly,” Wescott explained, was a form of “ugly,” and it was used to mean both extremes of attractiveness. That is, someone very beautiful would be “oogly,” and so would someone very ugly.
Being a professor, Wescott did what professors do: he published an article about “Ooglification in American English Slang.” It’s in the magazine “Verbatim” if you’re interested. The article describes a generalizable linguistic process by which the “oo” sound is substituted for another vowel sound and the result is to transform a normal word into slang. So instead of saying your friend’s new car was red, you might call it “rood,” which I guess would mean even redder. Or an overly affectionate dog wouldn’t be just “friendly”; it would be “froondly.”
If this sounds like something that comes from a not-particularly-interesting children’s TV show, it’s pretty close. Nothing like this process really happens in American English, slang or otherwise. Although, in the book “A Clockwork Orange,” the supposed slang of the future (the future of that book is basically right now, including the old ultraviolence) does sound like it was invented through a similar rules-based process (or “proocess”?) Wescott did list some slang terms that seemed like the result of ooglification. The word “divine” has been seen as “divoon,” and “Scandinavian” was recorded at least once as “Scandinoovian.” And the writer P.G. Wodehouse, in his 1919 book “A Damsel in Distress”, included this:
“‘I can ‘elp!’ persisted Albert. ‘Got a cigaroot? Do you smoke?’”
On the other hand, as far as anybody can tell, that’s the one and only time “cigarette” was ooglified, and it doesn’t seem in this case to involve the amplification suggested by Wescott. But it seems the good professor Wescott may not have been entirely serious about his analysis of ooglification. He had a legitimate point about linguistic processes turning accepted language into slang, but his example was, well, imooginary.
Slangification isn’t the only way words are created. There’s also the process common to scientific papers that aren’t about linguistics. Scientists invent new words all the time, and although not ooglification, there is a process involved. You start with a Latin or Greek root word, add another one, and if necessary manipulate it a bit so it actually sounds like a word. Like, for example, “oryzivorous.” Real word. Latin root is “oryza,” which means rice. The addition “-vorous” means eating, so “oryzivorous” means “eating rice.” The word is a bit obscure, but it appeared in a scientific glossary in 1857, and it’s part of the scientific name of a kind of blackbird: “dolichonyx oryzivorus.” The common name for the bird is “bobolink,” and they are very fond of rice, but they’re also partial to other kinds of seeds and grains.
You might have heard of the Swedish naturalist Karl Linnaeus —he’s the fellow who came up with the whole idea of formalized, Latin- and Greek-based names for plants and animals. It turns out he’s also the one who named the blackbird “dolichonyx oryzivorus,” in 1766. Except that he made a mistake; he initially named it “emeriza oryzivorus,” thinking it was a different sort of bird (a bunting). Eventually the bird was reclassified into what it’s called today. “Dolichonyx” is Greek, not Latin, and comes from “dolichos” (long) and “onyx” (claw). The bird has very long claws, as W J Swainson noticed in 1827 when he renamed it.
It seems the scientific word-coinage process isn’t just for coming up with terms; it also covers changing the terms you use when further investigation shows somebody made a mistake. But that doesn’t always help — for one thing, what are we supposed to do when ooglification goes wrong?
