by Jason Snell
Embiggening English
On the Oxford Dictionary blog, Michael Adams praises the linguistic invention of “The Simpsons”:
The first episode of The Simpsons aired twenty-five years ago, on 17 December, 1989, and since then, English has never been the same. Homer, Bart, Lisa, Marge, and their friends in Springfield, Wherever-it-is, have given us fancy words of pure invention, worthy of Lewis Carroll, like cromulent ‘legitimate, but not really’, and words built from worthy English parts, like the blend of opposites in craptacular ‘crappy, with attitude’ and embiggening ‘enlarging’… Embiggening is the sort of word you make up from scratch when you’re lacking the edumacation to know that enlarge already exists, and edumacation is the sort of word you use if you also use embiggening.
This is a fun article about the originalitism of the series that made D’oh the definitive annoyed grunt. (What? Originalitism is a perfectly cromulent word.)