March 05, 2005
New words

List of words I used to think I made up but turned out to be in wide-use:

When I was about five years old I made up this terrific word game. It was fun, imaginative and occupied my mind for hours. One day, feeling particularly generous towards my (normally hated) older brother I decided to share it with him. You simply took the last letter of the first word that came to you mind and had to think up a word that started with it.. then took the last letter of that word, and so on. I bet he's still laughing at me for thinking I made up a game everyone else in the world already knew. Life is so rough sometimes.

Posted March 05, 2005 05:22 PM in Random
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Comments
On March 5, 2005 09:24 PM liontaur added:

I thought for the longest time that I made up the word funner, it hurts to think there's a possibility that I didn't.

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On March 6, 2005 03:40 PM Aristotle added:

I've absolutely no luck with original coinage or other ideas. Sometimes I'll come up with a really obscure pun or bizarre play on words, and when I google it it turns out there are thousands of hits. At some point long ago (way before Google or even my introduction to the 'net) I realized that, being that there are over 6 billion people on Earth, it's exceedingly unlikely that anyone can have a thought which noone else has ever thought before.

I summarized this for myself in the pithy slogan “nothing is new,” which of course, true to itself, isn't new either.

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On March 7, 2005 04:16 AM Chris added:

I use googleable occasionaly. Good word :-)

-Chris

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On March 8, 2005 08:37 AM Paul added:

It's not so much that "nothing is new" but that all the pieces are in place. Many scientific discoveries come about at the same time - for example both Newton and Leibnitz developed calculus independently. There are many, many instances in history where the same idea comes to many people all at the same time.

Why? Because all the peices are there. Certain ideas can only exist because certain *other* ideas were in place first that fostered the development of the supposedly new idea. Once all the pieces are gathered, it is only a matter of time before SOMEBODY puts them all together.

As the saying goes, "If he didn't discover it, somebody else would have."

There are an endless number of new ideas which can be thought, but they cannot be conceived until their dependances come into existance. For example, the term "googleable" wouldn't exist without google. Once google came into existence, however, it was only a matter of time before the words "googleable", "googlicious", and "googledegook" came into being.

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