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Hello everyone, today I'm going to talk about neologism, I'm going to explain what it is,
I'm going to give some examples and a very useful exercise to understand it better.
Neologism is a newly coined term, phrase or word, that may be applied in the common use,
but it is not accepted in the mainstream language. So, we can defined neologism as a new word
that appears in a language, as a new meaning for an existing word or as a new use for an
existing word; sometimes this is called a semantic extension.
There are two types of neologisms The first one is form neologism, which are
those words created by two terms belonging to a certain language
For example, we have the word Radio and we have the word Controlled and the neologism
would be the word Radiocontrolled. For example, in Spanish we have the word AĆ©reo,
plus the word Nave The neologism would be aeronave
The second one is sense neologism, which are new words created by already existed terms,
but suffering semantic or meaning changes For example, we have the word Brother, which
means a relative, the son of my father or my mother
but brother can also mean a friend, a mate, someone I appreacite
In Spanish we have the word camello, which means an animal, but, camello, can also mean
a drug dealer, this is sense neologism
To understand better the examples of neologism, let's divide the words into fields, so first,
in science and technology we have words like X-ray, created in 1895, we have Radar, created
in 1941, from Radio Detection And Ranging, and we have Laser, created in 1960 from Light
Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation.
We have in popular culture and commerce words like Blog, Aspirin, Hoover, Kleenex and Frisbee
In politics we have words like Homophobia, created in 1969, we have Heterosexism, created
in 1979, we have Glocalisation, created in the 1980s, we have Islamophobia, created in
1991 and we have Californication created in the 1970s.
Finally, in Linguistics, we have words like Retronym, popularized in 1980, we have Backronym,
created in 1983, we have Typoglycemia, created by Matt Davis of Cambridge University in 2003,
we have Aptronym, created in 2003, popularized by Franklin Pierce Adams, we have Snowclone,
created in 2004 and we have Protologism created in 2005 among others.