This morning, my six-year-old decided he would come up with a new word. The word he invented was shimonrikblik [ ʃimoʊnɹɪkblɪk ]. I asked him what it meant and he thought for a while and said, “It’s another word for linguistics.” I love him. Then he told me I have to tell all my “linguistics people”, so I put it out on Twitter.
https://twitter.com/EvilJoeMcVeigh/status/964084153560989696
I started thinking about the definition he gave shimonrikblik. We already have a word for “linguistics” (hint: it’s “linguistics”). But language being what it is, this does not mean that we can’t have two words for the same thing. Many stuffy and prescriptive style guides will tell you that you shouldn’t use neologisms (new words) for things that we already have words for. Fortunately, few people read these guides and even fewer follow this particular piece of advice. What the guides usually forget to mention is that different words for the same concept can be used in different variations and registers of one language. For example:
soccer and football
regardless and irregardless
you (plural) and y’all, youse, yinz, etc.
The first of these is pretty much a difference between national variations: UK people use football, US and Australian(?) people use soccer, but there are variations within these countries. The second is a difference in register, with regardless being used in formal registers (and edited writing) and irregardless being used in informal registers (and casual spoken language). The last of these is again a difference in register, probably again mostly between formal/informal speech and writing, but this time there are many words used to address a group of people directly with a pronoun. Your choice of pronoun will depend on your regional dialect and the situation. You probably have at least two of these pronouns in your vocabulary. And I’m just talking about English. Other languages will do things differently.
For example, here’s a really interesting thing about synonyms in some of the languages of Australia.
In most [Aboriginal societies of Australia], an individual’s name would not be used after their death. Furthermore, in many of them, words which sounded similar to that individual’s name were also prohibited. This practice would clearly present many inconveniences if there were not some way of replacing the banned vocabulary. The usual practice, resting on the widespread multilingualism that was a standard feature of traditional Aboriginal society in Australia, was to adopt the translational equivalent of the prohibited word from a neighboring language, and to use it until the old word became reusable (Introducing Semantics by Nick Riemer, 2010, p. 154).
The words above are just what I was able to come up with off the top of my head. There are many more and the degree to which a pair of words is synonymous will depend on things such as context and senses. For example, football is not entirely synonymous with soccer because there is a sense of football which means the game that is played in America (FLY EAGLES FLY!!!) But maybe shimonrikblik has a chance of taking off? It’s the word children use for linguistics? It’s how linguists casually refer to their (awesome) field? It’s linguistics, but with a child-like innocence?