Bokeh becomes a verb, by Apple

Is it not soooooo exciting to see the birth of a new word?! It certainly was so when I saw a new ad by Apple. The ad is about the depth control of iPhone, and three mothers talk about how the picture of a child is blurred by using the word "bokeh".

Bokeh comes from a Japanese word ぼけ (blurr, hazy), and my ignorance pains me, but the word is fairly universal in the world of photography. The word was introduced and popularized in 1997 in a photography magazine. The Japanese word ぼけ has several meanings, but the photographic technical term bokeh means a kind of artistic haziness / blur, and photographic magazines takes it up as technical topics in their articles. Back then, the term bokeh was used as a noun, which seems to be the usual start of neology ('to achieve great bokeh', 'bokeh produced by ** lens', 'creative application of bokeh' ),.

Now, the noun bokeh has come to a new phase - it has become a verb! And I feel that it will be firmly and casually accepted in our vocabulary, owing to the power of Apple. The mothers in the ad talks as below:

mother 1 : Did you bokeh my child?
mother 2 : Um, no, that was totally unintentional...
               Look, I can un-bokeh, see...  Bokeh, un-bokeh.
mother 1 : Wow, what kind of person bokehs a child?
               I would never bokeh your child.


The word is so naturally conjugated as a regular transitive verb, used in interrogative sentence, affixable too.

This verb-ing of the word may already have been done among photograph enthusiasts, but the impact of the ad by the "Apple" certainly will get the word accepted universally.

Oh, and please do read the comments sent to the article  about this verb-ing of Bokeh by Apple. Many photograph lovers write about the word bokeh, how the term was used as a noun first, and it does not mean just a blur but the quality needs to be considered... etc.

®.I.P. Zipper (1925-1930) Epitaph file 01

®.I.P. Epitaph series 01 Trademarks that unfortunately lost its effect.

Zipper is now common and indispensable fastening item in clothing, luggage, camping and sports goods. It can fasten two edges of materials or flexible items by clasping metal or plastic teeth together. Not many people know that the word "zipper" was once a trademark (I did not know until recently).

The item was invented by an American inventor Whitcomb Judson in 1893, but the product name was not as is now, it was then called a "clasp locker".

The trademark "Zipper", and "Zipper Boots" were first registered by B. F. Goodrich Company in 1925. They used the fastening item in their rubber boots.

The word 'zip' was already in the English vocabulary since the late 19th century as onomatopoeic noun and verb, meaning the sound of a fast moving item or the act of moving very fast. It is said that an executive of B. F. Goodrich Company used to slide the fastener up and down saying "zip 'er up", and the trademark "Zipper" was made.

In 1930, the company sued to protect the trademark but lost, and the word Zipper became just a generic 'zipper'. Genericide victim...

In 1936, a new verb 'to zip' meaning to 'zipper up' something joined the dictionary. And of course because it is a new verb, it inflects in regular form (why it is a regular verb); zip, zipping, zipped, not zap.

"I'm lookiting"

I used to collect "Peanuts" comic books when I was very young. It sort of became a rule in me to buy a new book when the family went on a holiday trip and read it through during the trip. I think I was about 8 when I started this, and I still have the books I got then.

There is one comic strip that I remember very clearly, and it happens to be about inflecting a new verb.

Charlie Brown's friend is jumping rope, and she wants him to look at her. Here is the comic strip.

(by Charles Schulz   Feb, 18th 1963)

"I'm lookiting!"

I found it very funny.

I liked the sound very much and I remember saying it over and over, I'm lookiting, I'm lookiting!

Lookit is 'look it', meaning to look at it. 

The little kids in Peanuts must be around 7. Children around that age have fairly good command of their mother tongue, but most of their knowledge of the language is acquired verbally, from 'strings of sounds'. Unlike written language, verbally produced language does not have any markers to tell where are the starts and ends of words or sentences. Then how can a child know when hearing a sentence if the verb contained is an intransitive or a phrasal verb or a transitive verb that needs an object?

It is very plausible that the children in that linguistic stage to make a rough guess about the word (in this case, verb) using the cues they get from the pauses and breaks of sound.

For the girl and Charlie, 'lookit' was one verb. She may have heard some grown-ups around her using it like "Oh, look it!" She uses it in imperative, Charlie uses it in present continuous form, although he has never heard it before. He applied the regular rule of forming a present continuous. It seems that Linus was the only one who knew that there was no such verb as 'lookit'.

Children cleverly and productively create maximum output from the minimum grammatical knowledge they have. Whenever they have no example to refer to, they go for the regular rule. 

To google - why it is a regular verb - Part 1

In my earlier entry Google - worldwide genericide, there was a list of verbs "to google" in other languages, and I noted that all the verbs that show regular verb inflection. Why are they regular verbs? Let me show you here what happens when a new verb enters our language by looking at language acquisition of children learning English as their first language.

Preschool children (age 4 to 6) start talking in sentences, and they also start using their knowledge of morphology quite cleverly and productively. They encounter numerous new words everyday, but they somehow figure out the new words' parts of speech and how to inflect them.

We often see children make errors like breaked or comed - they overgeneralize the regular verb inflection rules to irregular verbs to make past tense. Unfortunately for children acquiring language, ten most frequent verbs in English, which could also be equivalent to ten most frequent verbs that the children need to learn early in life, are all irregular verbs (be, have, do, say, make, go, take, come, see, get). Regular verbs come lower in frequency, but children, when they make past tense, apply productively the regular verb inflection rule, adding -d to the verb, to new verbs they encounter.

Berko (1957) has shown in experiments (so called wug test) with preschool children the over-application of regular inflectional rules of nouns and verbs in nonsense words.

Number of nonsense monosyllabic words were made up, and pictures to represent the nonsense words were drawn on cards. A text, omitting the desired form was typed on each card. Children, and also adult subjects as control group, were shown the cards and the text read, and were induced to say the nonsense word in the inflected form. Here is an example of the question forming past tense.

This is a man who knows how to RICK. He is RICKING. He did the same thing yesterday. What did he do yesterday?
Yesterday, he ..............................

Over 76 percent of the children answered RICKED. They apply the regular inflection rule to the nonsense word. The percentage is higher of adult subjects. They are applying regular suffixing rule to form the past tense.

Inflections of irregular verbs, on the other hand, are memorized, stored in their memory.

In the human mind, the memory and rule interact in a fairly simple way (Pinker 1999) - if a word can provide its own past tense form from memory, the regular rule is blocked, but elsewhere, by default, the rule applies. That's why adults and children can inflect the nonsense word because there are no memorized inflected forms that is stored in the memory.

A new word "to google", which has no memory stored information on its past tense, has to be inflected in regular form.

(to be continued)

Berko, J. (1958) The child's learning of English morphology.  Word, 14, 150-177
Pinker, S. (1999) Words and Rules  New York N.Y. : Harper Perrenial

Inflectional Simplicity

European languages have inflections: the noun, the adjective, the verb.

The Inflection of the verb is particularly called "conjugation."
For example, Latin "amo" (love) conjugates as follows (English on the right):

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amo (I love)
amas (You love)
amat (He, She, or It loves)
amamus (We love)
amatis (You [plural] love)
amant They love)
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As descendants of Latin, romance languages retain the various verb-ending.

Compared with these, one might be surprised to see how little English verb changes, only requiring "s" in the third person singular.

Indeed, what characterises the present-day English is its inflectional simplicity, which can encourages second language learners to pick up the language more smoothly and easily.
Yet, it is not necessarily so. Here is a heads-up from Baugh and Cable:   

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One must take care not to overstate the importance of this feature for second-language learners of English, as early editions of the present text perhaps did. Studies of second-language acquisition have shown, for example, that an English speaker learning German will have a mix of advantages and disadvantages . . . (10)
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It's interesting that they allude to the early editions, saying that they "perhaps overstated" the importance of inflectional simplicity. This suggest that, over time, more emphasis has been placed on the external factors rather than intrinsic value of language.

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Works Cited:
Baugh, Albert C. and Thomas Cable. A History of the English Language. 6th ed. London: Routledge, 2013.