February 24, 2008 by Craig
When does a word become a word?
Today Laura described something as “strambotic”. I blinked when I heard this. I have a pretty big vocabulary but Laura does, on occasion, use an English word that I’m not familiar with. This is pretty rare though, so I was curious to see if this was one of those times.
So I asked her to Google it.
Results 1 – 10 of about 180 for strambotic.
Did you mean: estrambotica.
Note the lack of definition link for “strambotic.” Given this Googlethority I claim that “strambotic” is not a valid English word.
Now, could it be?
- As I originally suspected, Laura was transliterating a valid Spanish word “estrambotica” (it means “pompous”) into English. The rules for doing this include “drop the leading “e” before an “s”" and “drop the last letter if it’s an “a” or “o”". It works a surprising amount of the time… which is why its failures are notable (and often humorous).
- It’s not a raw invention; “estrambotica” a valid Spanish word with a defined and accepted meaning. There’s a pretty good chance that there’s similar words in Portuguese, Italian, and French.
- There’s other cases (180 according to Google) of people using it. There’s a demand.
- I’ve heard it said that dictionaries describe a language but do not define it. (Note that this is different than what elementary school would have you believe, and doesn’t necessarily apply for regulated languages like French). That is, once a word becomes “official” by entering the common speech, it is included in dictionaries… not the other way around. Thus, “strambotic” isn’t invalid just because it doesn’t have a dictionary entry.
I guess “valid” or “invalid” isn’t applicable for English words. What’s really important to ask is “will people understand what I mean when I use it?” Since “strambotic” isn’t common and isn’t easy to look up, the answer is “no”, and thus you probably shouldn’t use it… at least not yet.