For today's entry, we make a rare safari into the jungles of Wiktionary. Exciting, I know!
I've been familiar with the word "twitterpated" to mean lovestruck, but I was not aware that the first usage of the term was the movie Bambi. Let's all thank our lucky stars that we have monolithic entertainment corporations to embiggen our collective vocabulary.
Bambi was released in 1942 and the book it was based on, the dynamically titled Bambi, a Life in the Woods was published in 1923; so I suppose this would make "twitterpated" a neologism. But then again, what's the expiration date on a term being a neologism? Twitterpated has been around for at least 67 years; there are certainly many people still alive who were around before the advent of the word-- and oh what a dark and wretched time it was, only being able to describe someone as "besotted" or "smitten"-- but it's still a word that gained popular use through a movie, which, relative to the history of language is pretty cutting edge. So does that mean it's a paleoneologism? Destined in a few decades to become a simple word before retiring to Boca Raton with (obsolete) tacked onto the beginning of its definition?
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4 comments:
When I read the word "embiggen," my first thought was The Simpsons. But those same Wiktionary jungles reveal a citation for the word "embiggen" in print as far back as 1884. Ain't the English language great?
This is good enough because doing a "safari" as you said is perfect but I think I prefer doing a "safari" Through generic viagra because that's the way I feel strong.
Bambi is perfect that is the story I'm reading while I'm in the pharmacy the place where I WORK.
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