To Coin a Phrase

Last Saturday, I coined a new phrase. At least I think I did.

I occasionally think about a sentence I’ve just spoken and wonder if anyone has ever spoken that combination of words before. So I have a little experience running internal debates as to the likelihood a given phrase has been previously uttered. These days, though, it doesn’t have to be all conjecture. Google provides a powerful way to test your theory out, to some degree. You can at least ask the simpler question of whether anyone has written it on a web page yet.

The concept of a “Googlewhack” was thus rather interesting to me. I felt like I had pretty good reasoning skills in this area, and indeed have been able to find googlewhacks fairly easily.

Another related concept that I daydream about is the spread of slang. How do new slang terms or catchy phrases enter the vernacular? Obviously many get spread widely through movies. But were they really original to those movie writers anyway? And what about ones that haven’t been in movies? Do they have one author or are they often derived independently?

Are there a lot of people out there that bitterly tell their friends, “Did you hear that guy? He said, ‘cool beans’ — that’s my phrase! I invented that years ago!” Sometimes I hear someone say something that I said years ago and I wonder if it’s just now circling around, or if I might have even invented it.

This brings me back to my new phrase. Was it really new, or had someone already used it on the wide, wide web of witticism? It’s fairly obvious, so it seemed reasonable to me that someone, maybe a dozen people, might have coined it independently. I was a bit disheartened yesterday to submit it to Google and find a whopping 22,000 results returned. But looking through a dozen or so, none of those were using it in the same way I was.

After all that setup, my phrase will probably come as a disappointment. On the other hand, it’s rather self-referentially emblematic of this entire Seinfeldian blog-about-nothing approach. So here it is in a sentence: My trip to the mall was successful, but it was nothing to blog about. It just updates that old “nothing to write home about” phrase and brings it into the new millenium.

Googling for the corollary “nothing to blog home about”, however, is revealing. There are 204 of those on the web today, and 133 copies of “nothing to email home about”. So I haven’t really a coined a phrase, I’ve only independently derived it. Maybe next time.