Gideon Lewis-Kraus (who has made appearances here before, e.g. in 2014) has a most interesting New Yorker piece “How Test Engineers Decide What Counts as Good Enough” (archived) that starts with bears used as product testers for bear-resistant containers and goes in all sorts of directions. Here’s the passage that brings it to LH:
For as long as humans have flown, humans have flown into birds. Wilbur Wright survived the first avian strike; another early pilot, who might have thought it would be funny to surprise a flock of seagulls, did not. Few people are eager to rehearse an engine failure in midair. Presumably the same goes for the birds. The “bird ingestion test” is a classic example of a situation in which testers must operate under facsimile conditions. They rig up a hangar with a specialized cannon that shoots thawed bird carcasses into the blender of a spooled-up engine. The protocol has been formalized with great care. It begins with a single four-pound chicken, moves on to a fusillade of eight members of a smaller bird species, and concludes with sixteen tiny feather balls. The risk is deemed acceptable if an engine retains at least three-quarters of its power.
The statistical reasoning is sound, even if the ingestion test’s verisimilitude is a little hand-wavy. Bird populations change; migratory patterns, or what experts call “waves of biomass,” are fickle. In almost half of the bird-strike incidents investigated by the Federal Aviation Administration, the turbine’s charnel house is so messy that the culprit’s species remains anybody’s guess. (Davies, who has a wonderful ear for niche jargon, is pleased to report that bird slurry is called “snarge.”) We can be fairly certain that no snarge can be traced to chickens, which do not fly. From 1990 to 2019, Davies writes, “the FAA recorded more bearded seal strikes (one) than chicken-on-plane encounters (zero).” Testers resort to chicken artillery in the absence of a robust supply chain for osprey.
As soon as I hit “snarge” I knew I had to post it. What a great word! (Wiktionary says “Blend of snot + garbage,” but I’m not sure I believe that; I’d rather believe the word fell from the heavens like blue ice.)
The whole article is worth reading; here’s a good tidbit:
The testing industry, Davies emphasizes, consists of trade-offs all the way down. Although some products that made it to market were needlessly dangerous—there was never a reason for the Little Lady Hot Stove, a postwar toy, to be able to reach six hundred degrees, or for contemporaneous science kits to include actual uranium—other products aren’t useful if they can’t hurt you.
He gets into some hard-hitting stuff after talking about the idea “that what we understand about the world cannot be separated from how we have decided to understand it, and to what end”:
In all these examples, people imagine the goals, people invent the metrics, people run the trials, and people learn from their errors. The anecdotes pile up to form a brief in defense of human judgment. It’s easy to understand why Davies thinks this is needful. As he puts it, “Ours is a precarious moment, scarred by a pandemic and stunned by an accelerating climate crisis, run-amok tech companies, torrential misinformation, and eroding trust in public institutions.” The political environment has been resolutely hostile to those who develop, maintain, and enforce our civilization’s rules. They are—in the view of both the young, inexperienced men who worked for Elon Musk’s DOGE and the older, more experienced appointees who have stripped regulatory and scientific agencies of their power—plodding, blank-faced dullards with nothing better to do than slow things down. Davies properly recasts his subjects as diligent, rigorous, imaginative public servants who protect our fingers from lawnmower blades and our children from white-hot toy ovens.
That’s not all. The engineers’ aspiration to stage reality inside the lab further demonstrates, Davies argues, that “perfect similarity is unattainable, and all testing relies on a leap of faith.” We started with vaguely bearlike weights and vaguely clawlike hooks, then replaced them with actual bears, which we, in turn, replaced with better bears—the greatest of which has lent its name to Davies’s book. The whole endeavor has something noble and priestly about it: the work is never done.
And he ends with a blast against AI nonsense that is (needless to say) music to my eyes.
2009 LL post on “snarge” with useful info in comments on earlier uses with other senses. I guess that, as a monosyllable permitted by English phonotactics but not (until perhaps recently) associated with any widely-known stable meaning, it was always up for grabs for creative use.
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1066
I’m just glad I didn’t comment in that thread, allowing me to believe I missed it back in 2009 rather than its being yet another example of my failing memory!
Also, the earlier uses strengthen my conviction that the Wiktionary version is just another folk etymology.
Maybe the best description o the word SNARGE is “a fanciful coinage” or “a jocular coinage.”
Speaking of coinages, my English has only “coin a word” and derivatives, such as “the coinage of a word” and “the coiner of a word,” whereas “invent a word,” “the invention of a word,” and “the inventor of a word” strike me as new.
Michael Quinion’s World Wide Words also covered snarge in 2009:
(“Carla Dove” is one for the nominative determinism lists.)
A mangled (sorry) form of snarledge?
You may as well try to divine the etymology of slurm. It’s phonesthemes all the way.
M: look in Google Books and you’ll find “inventor of the word”, “invented word”, “invention of a word”, etc. in the 19th and 20th centuries. Or google “invented the word” site:languagehat.com, you should get hits back to 2005.
In the OED under invent:
From The Blue Cross:
From the notes to The Blue Cross in Kingsley Amis’ anthology of favourite short stories:
Here invented is Usefully Distinct from coined.
It seems a pity that Lord Snarge apparently never reappeared in print after his star turn as the offstage villain in that 1933 novel by Tomlinson. There could have been a whole series of Lord Snarge books!
ETA: That Tomlinson novel should be in the public domain soon enough, so the field will then be wide open to anyone who had further adventures to propose for Lord Snarge.
I was thinking that an invented word is a nonce word and a coined word is a neologism, but the Huxley “agnostic” is a counter-example.
It’s phonesthemes all the way
Lord Snarge
Quinion on snarge:
This other snarge recalls snurge. In the OED:
Also of unknown origin.
A review here of a recent revival of the play containing the first attestation cited in the OED and Green.
Both “coined” and “invented” are used in the OED’s etymologies; I don’t see any distinction in how they use them. Some examples of “invented”:
ammonia (entry from 1884): “< modern Latin ammonia, invented by Bergman, in 1782, as a name for the gas obtained from sal ammoniac: see ammoniac adj.”
blatant (entry from 1887): “Apparently invented by Spenser, and used by him as an epithet of the thousand-tongued monster begotten of Cerberus and Chimæra, the ‘blatant’ or ‘blattant beast’, by which he symbolized calumny.”
Kodak (entry from 1901): “An arbitrary word invented by Mr. G. Eastman for trademark purposes.”
scapegoat (entry from 1910): “Apparently invented by Tyndale (1530) to express what he believed to be the literal meaning of Hebrew ʿăzāzēl, occurring only in Leviticus xvi. 8, 10, 26.”
Xerox (entry from 1986): “Invented word < xero- (in xerography n.).”
tabloid (entry from 2008): “The term was invented by Burroughs, Wellcome, & Company and registered by them as a trademark on 14 Mar. 1884 … ”
widget (entry from 2017): “G. S. Kaufman and M. Connelly are often credited with having invented the word for their play Beggar on Horseback (compare quot. 1924 at sense 1a), which was adapted as a (silent) film in 1925.”
etc.
As for agnostic (entry from 2012): “Apparently coined by T. H. Huxley as an antonym for gnostic n.: for further discussion see B. V. Lightman Origins of Agnosticism (1987) 10–13. (Apparently earlier examples of this word show errors for agonistic.)” Huxley wasn’t the first to get the word into the written record, but he and others who knew him said it was his idea.
Yes, I wouldn’t have thought there was any but a stylistic difference between “coined” and “invented” in this context.
Would you use “coined” for a word like floccinauci- etc. or brillig?
FWIW, I think “coin” carries a stronger implication that the word was generally adopted; a merely invented word is more likely to have been a nonce word, or a piece of fictional slang only used in a particular novel, or similar
But “nonce coinage” is Out There™, so it’s clearly not a strictly obeyed rule.
As a metaphor, “coining” suggests entering circulation, becoming common currency. (Private mints and non-circulating legal tender do exist. So do etymological fallacies.)
Several times in the early 80s I examined in detail the short articles placed on the first page of the economics section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine. Many of these articles were poorly written.
The numbers and statistics that were cited often had no systematic relationship to each other. It was impossible to figure out even the simplest missing statistic (for instance a ratio) on the basis of the statistics given (a mixture of absolute numbers and ratios – prices, turnover, inflation rates …).
I made a nuisance of myself in letters to the editor, complaining about these articles. But they did acknowledge my letters and conceded that the articles could have been better written. Nothing changed, of course, so I kept firing off letters.
One of them never got acknowledged, however. The article used the words “clip”, “rate” and “pace”. I complained that I couldn’t figure out what the different meanings might be.
Later I felt like a complete idiot. This was just a case of elegant variation, which indeed can be an annoying distraction, but hardly justified waking a FAZ editor out of his economic slumber.
I think “coin” carries a stronger implication that the word was generally adopted
I suspect you’re right, and that’s probably a factor in the statistics of usage, but any given person might use either term without reference to that.
But the “invented terms” used by Father Brown involve a specific and usually-pejorative use of “invented” that you can’t do with “coined.” The “invented” there is parallel to the pejorative participles in e.g. “manufactured story” or “fabricated alibi.” It implies fraudulence and deception, although I guess Fr. Brown was thought permitted to do that sort of thing when tricking Flambeau. The words/phrases Flambeau didn’t understand were not merely newly-coined (in the apparently relevant senses), they were phony and lacked real-world referents.
By contrast, there is no implicature that Huxley’s motives were fraudulent, at least as to the word-coining aspect. “Invent” has perfectly benign-or-neutral uses, just as “manufacture” and “fabricate” do.
I took “invented” to mean the terms were invented not by the character Father Brown but by the author Chesterton, to add comic verisimilitude to the story. In the Father Brown Fictonal Universe, there is a real trick called the Donkey’s Whistle known only to the most depraved criminals and the surprisingly worldly Father Brown, and unknown to the gentleman thief Flambeau. Chesterton probably never bothered imagining the details of the trick, leaving that pleasant chore to the reader.
Here’s an extended writeup about snarge (scroll up to the start of the chapter by Gary Kroll, a professor of history at SUNY Plattsburgh), in which snarge is not limited to bird remains but includes any critter accidentally squished by humans and their contraptions (all those squished mammals on the road, for example) fitting it all in something he calls the “snarge matrix.” Snarge is described as an artifact of the Anthropocene; human responses are typically built around avoidance of collisions, but Kroll also gets into suggestions like deceleration (slow living), which could help not only snarged species but slow down global warming as well. For that to happen, Kroll ends, rather than just avoiding that tortoise in the road or moving it to the side, “snarge would have us selling our cars and taking the bus.”
Vehicle collisions with non-human animals are not actually a creation of the 20th century or internal combustion engines. The internet tells me that “cowcatcher” is first attested in 1838, and the function of the cowcatcher is solely to make sure the cow does not damage the locomotive, rather than vice versa.
I see that Wikipedia lists proposed starting dates for the Anthropocene: 1963, 1952, 1945, around 1850, 1750, 1712, 1592, and 5,000–15,000 years ago, in which case the Anthropocene might be coextensive with the Holocene.
Is there a paleontologist in the audience?
How are geochronologic units divided, when the transition in the fossil record is gradual with respect to the chronological resolution?
@Y. Wikipedia tells me that the Pliocene epoch extended from 5.333 ± 0.08 million years ago to 2.58 ± 0.04 million years ago. At least if you agree that the subsequent Gelasian age is properly allocated to the Pleistocene instead of Pliocene. So the difference between A.D. 1963 and 15K years ago may be immaterial given the typical degree of precision in such things.
This temporal vagueness is obviously inconvenient to those who want the arrival of a new -cene to be a basis to argue for changes in public policy or cultural practice, but maybe no one at the time of the Pliocene/Pleistocene transition was engaging in internet arguments about that sort of thing.
Absolute precision is roughly proportional to the age, so 2.5 ± 0.04 my is equivalent to 10000 ± 160 y. I believe the error ranges quoted are all due to the limits of radiometric dating, not to fuzzy boundaries.
How long have the anthropoi been ceneing? Depends on who counts as an anthropos, I suppose, and how much ceneing counts as significant ceneing.
Mind you, I suppose it’s only comparatively recently sub specie aeternitatis that there have been enough anthropoi to make a significant difference at all.
the most compelling markers for the Anthropocene (better called the Capitalocene) that I’ve seen are the appearance in the geological record of rapidly increasing atmospheric CO2 (1st half of the 19thC) or of airborne radioactive debris (mid-1940s). what’s at issue in the periodization isn’t the presence of H. sapiens (or other homnins that we could call anthropoi), but the geological impact of the species. we have massively better observed data, at a massively higher level of temporal resolution, for the start of the Capitalocene than for previous geological epochs, so it’s possible to mark the era’s start at a year or decade without being too arbitrary.
Point.
the Anthropocene (better called the Capitalocene)
For its detractors, the Nobody-knows-the-trouble-I’ve-cene.
The most recent damage to our environment has occurred in the Plasticene.
The French can descend rapidly into silliness, even while riding their high horse !
#
In L’Emballement du monde, a social history of energy exploitation, IFP School* professor Victor Court evaluates and ultimately rejects the Capitalocene.[f]
…
Fundamentally, Court believes that while capitalist dynamics undeniably cause environmental damage, they are only one exemplar of the true problem, namely “protean and omnipresent relations of domination between individuals.”
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Looks we’re in for the long haul, folks. I don’t see relations of domination between individuals going away any time soon. Even if we could make them a little less protean and omnipresent. What would replace them? Committee meetings ? Consensual sex ?
Bismillah c’est les tenèbres ! [A funny-sad incident involving the police during the recent street violence and demonstrations in France]
*The IFP School (French: École Nationale Supérieure du Pétrole et des Moteurs – ENSPM). A hangover from the Kerocene.
The most recent damage to our environment has occurred in the Plasticene.
America had one foot in the Epicene, but the Republicans chopped it off.
Didn’t Tom Lehrer say something about “the Modern, or Obscene, Era” in one of his song introductions? I must be misremembering part of that.
@rozele: the most compelling markers for the Anthropocene (better called the Capitalocene) that I’ve seen are the appearance in the geological record of rapidly increasing atmospheric CO2 (1st half of the 19thC) or of airborne radioactive debris (mid-1940s). what’s at issue in the periodization isn’t the presence of H. sapiens (or other homnins that we could call anthropoi), but the geological impact of the species.
I think the idea of the millennia-ago dates is that burning as a means of ecosystem control, and then agriculture, show up or expected to show up in the geological record from back then.