New coinage, but not quite mine

kw: words, definitions

I didn't quite coin this word, or at least I am not the first to coin it, but I made it up on the fly and then looked to see if it exists. It is not found in any online dictionary I've searched, so I plan to add these entries to TheFreeDictionary as soon as I complete this post:

• youthify, vt, Verb form of youth. To give something a younger appearance. past & ppt youthified, 3 pers sing youthifies.
• youthification, n, from youthify. The action or process of making something appear newer or younger.

I produced the word when writing class materials for a short course in digital darkroom techniques. The blur operation, I wrote, is used "to reduce noise or to youthify a portrait."

I remember a photographer describing the enlarger (wet darkroom) technique of making a flattering portrait of an older person. One step is to hold a piece of thin muslin halfway between the enlarger lens and the print paper, moving it so no fabric grid will show. This softens the image, making the small wrinkles disappear. Judicious use of digital blurring has the same effect.

It also reminded me of a friend who began to get cataracts at the rather early age of 45. By age 55 he had to have them removed. This was about 25 years ago, soon after the new outpatient techniques were developed. He had the procedure, and new plastic lenses implanted, and went home. He looked at himself in the mirror and asked his wife (who told me), "Where did all these wrinkles come from?" She said they'd been there a while, but his vision had been too blurry to see them. His bad eyes youthified him!

Words beyond words

kw: musings, words, definitions

Reading Kluge, which I reviewed yesterday, got me thinking about language. While we may have the largest number of words in the English language, there aren't actually enough of them. How else to explain the large number of words with multiple meanings? These are a source of puns, plus plenty of confusion.

One of my favorites is the word display. According to my big desk dictionary (Webster's New Twentieth Century Dictionary, the unabridged Second Edition), the word has:

• 5 meanings as a transitive Verb (one that takes an object: "…to display a coat of arms…")
  
• 2 meanings as an intransitive Verb (no object: "…Picasso displayed last week…")
• 5 meanings as a Noun ("I brought a display of widgets.")
• and it can be used as an Adjective ("…a display card…")

This isn't the English word most prolific of meanings. The entries for cover takes up three times the column space, having 20 transitive and 3 intransitive Verbal uses, 9 Noun uses, and at least a dozen separate entries for Adjective uses such as "cover girl".

When we talk about a "word", is display one word or twelve? Is cover really thirty-plus words? It is for reasons such as these that I once proposed to a standards-making group of which I was briefly a part, that a set of unambiguous codes be invented for unique meanings, which would upon completion greatly facilitate automatic translation of documents.

Thus the word word can be a slippery concept. No wonder we need specialists to write the deathly dull, but unambiguous documents that convey agreements, treaties and contracts. It just doesn't come naturally, folks!