Tuesday, May 4, 2010

Lexical Gap: Noun for 'Ridiculous'

When we make up new words, our motivation is typically that we have an idea to express but do not have a word for it; thus, we have a lexical gap--a gap where the precise word we are looking for should be. Sometimes lexical gaps are legitimate ones (i.e., our language truly does not have a word to express what we would like to express). Oftentimes, though, lexical gaps are speaker-dependent. There is a word in our language that would work--we just don't know about it, or it doesn't quite sound right for the situation.

For example, the other day I was driving down the road and got stuck behind someone going a good 15 mph below the speed limit. I couldn't go around the car because I needed to stay in the right lane so that I could make a right turn into a parking lot. The car in front of me was already going slow--in and of itself a frustrating experience--but as we got closer to where I needed to turn, the car in front of me kept going slower and slower and slower... until I shouted, "Enough of this ridiculosity!" Yes, road rage gets the best of us. Not only did I shout in my car at the driver in front of me, but I also experienced a momentary lexical gap in my vocabulary.

After my outburst, I started a conversation with myself (I was alone in the car) that went something like this:

Hmm... Ridiculosity doesn't sound like a real word. But what is the noun form of ridiculous? I'm fairly sure we have one because we'd need a noun to describe a ridiculous situation without using complex phrases full of modifiers when one word could sum it all up. The go-to suffix for making nouns tends to be -ness, so is ridiculousness the word I'm looking for? Well, that just sounds ridiculous. There's far too many s sounds in a row for that to be a good word. Ridiculousness... ridiculosity. I like ridiculosity better, but something is telling me ridiculousness is actually the word.
When I got home, I went to my handy Mac dictionary, and--sure enough--ridiculousness is, in fact, the noun form of the adjective ridiculous. However, I think we should start a campaign that any adjective ending in -ous should form its noun counterpart by using the -ity suffix (thus changing the -ous to simply -os when spelling out the whole word). Words like ridiculousness, incredulousness, and marvelousness just sound wrong. Don't ridiculosity, incredulosity, and marvelosity just sound better?

5 comments:

  1. so agreed with you. i'm trying to write an essay and i wrote down ridiculosity, but it was underlined red haha

    ReplyDelete
  2. Spell check needs to catch up with the times! It's been telling me for nearly 7 years now that 'quotative' isn't a word... If I knew who to write to in order to fix these oversights (including 'ridiculosity' and other such fun nouns), I would be sending letters daily. :)

    ReplyDelete
  3. I actually think "ridiculousness" does sound better, sorry to say =)
    But I get your point though, it sounds a bit strange, but people will get what you mean when you say it, and it makes sense, so i like it :)

    ReplyDelete
  4. This blog is a fine place to get valuable data! Will you be mind if I make a trackback of one of your entries on my personal blog?

    ReplyDelete
  5. Why, thank you! I would not mind at all.

    ReplyDelete