Lingua Pranka

When a blogger lacks for inspiration, he piggybacks on his fellow blogger. And so today's topic is borrowed from Bryan Appelyard, as interpreted by the Daily Duck's own dean of all things literary, literate and literal, Brit. Bryan posts this hilarious deleted entry from Wikipedia on the topic of "Voltron":

Voltron is about uber l337 robot felines that join together to fight evil the voltron form, wihch is a big gay manform robot that kills so much. i used to have a voltron coloring book when i was little but i dont know where it went. damit it was nice too, tole the whole voltron story all about action. i even made voltron my msn name cause MTV made a joke about a "voltron of crap" this means like a "super conglomeration of crap" or a "network of crap" like MTV. i hope voltron rapes MTV and sets it all on fire to death. ApoC, 2003. so do I.'

From this simple mangling of language Brit has coined the term Voltronese to describe the emerging international pidgin tongue evolving from the globalization of culture:

One of the arguments I've used against Esperanto as a concept is that even if it was somehow imposed on the world overnight, within a generation or two local differences would mean that Russian Esperanto, English Esperanto, Italian Esperanto, Chinese Esperanto etc would have diverged so far that you would need translators between them.

It could therefore only ever be useful as a worldwide second language, not a first. But then another agument against it is that English is set to become the international second language anyway. But what would happen if English started becoming so important that it became a first language nearly everywhere?

Maybe it would start morphing into these weird 'voltron of crap' local dialects. And these would in turn feedback into the orginal language by a process of natural selection. And thus we would end up eventually with a single, global language after all.

Let's call it Voltron English. You heard it here first.
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The question is whether the removal of this isolation by globalisation and the internet will mean that we will end up with a single, hybrid global Voltronese spoken by everybody. And if this happens, will the world have better understanding but fewer souls?

I, for one, am putting my dollars on Babel. But it's an interesting concept. Language has always given in to local context. Do the deinizens of Arizona have a word for "Noreaster"? Do they need one? The hardy Inuit have a jillion words for snow, but not a single word for "turbofan". And African American hip culture constantly evolves new terms to describe two basic, interrelated concepts: "coolness" and "uncoolness". Phat, def, illin, kashizzle, you name it. They are the Inuit of cool.

As Brit has gotten into the word-coining business, I'd like to invite Daily Duck readers to follow along. Comedian Rich Hall coined the term "sniglet" to represent words that should be in a dictionary but aren't. Here are some examples of sniglets from Hall:

# ARG (Audio Retinal Gyration): The act of trying to read the label on a LP record while it's playing on a turntable. (Hall 1985a: 93)
# Blemus: The film that develops on top of some soups and gravies when left unstirred.
# Blivet: to flip your pillow looking for a cool spot (Hall 1984: 14)
# Cheedle: The orange residue left on fingers after eating Cheetos or some other cheesy snack (Hall 1984: 21)
# Execuglide: The act of using your wheeled office chair to move from one place to another. (Hall 1985a: 31)

I've been thinking of concepts that cry out for a word. Here are the definitions, you supply the words:

1, The distance between oneself and a stranger following less than which it would be rude not to hold a door open for, but further than which would make it seem creepily familiar to the other person if you held the door open for them.

2. The art of placing a coin or small object in a hidden spot in a public place with the intent of revisiting the spot many years later to see if the object is still there.

3. The temporary sensation of finding the pronounciation of a common word strange sounding.

4. The act of blaming one's flatulence on a dog.

5. The quality of macho nerdiness displayed by action oriented techie types like the mission control guys in Apollo 13.