GIGO: words unreadable aloud
Mishrogo Weedapeval
 

 

  Wednesday 26 January 2005
Nuncocentric

I decided to coin a word. Tonight, zero hits on google. Here's my bozos-list email about it:

Hey, all you Latinophiles, sesquipedalians, and neologians, I'm not sure there's a word for this, but I'm trying to find or coin one.

It's related to egocentric and ethnocentric.

It's related to TWIAVBP (The World Is A Very Big Place), the acronym that the AFU-ers (alt.folklore.urban) used to use to tell people that not everyone's environment is the same as yours.

But it's about time. "NOW-centric".

People have ranted and railed, whined and wailed, for millennia about how terrible things are Right Now, how near the end of the world is if we don't [DO SOMETHING], how important it is to change this terrible course we're on ... and it's always about Right Now. There's a great (probably apocryphal) quote about how wild the younger generation is, how it is clearly leading to the demise of all civilization on earth, and so on, and it turns out to be a quote written by a Greek guy in 1000 BC or something.

So what's the word for this too-common lack of temporal perspective, this failure to realize that things have been worse, been better, and that Right Now isn't (usually) the brink of terrible disaster?

One suggestion was that this sounded too much like an obsession with the sisters in a convent; another one (from Jamie) was:

The Latin "prope" meaning: near, nearly, not far from, just now, closely, not long from now. All of which seem apt, and I feel the resultant word, "propecentric" to have a more pleasant ring to it, and to sound less made-up despite its manufactured nature.

Though I agree about "propecentric"'s more pleasant ring, I feel ever so slightly more inclined toward nuncocentric, because I think it'd be slightly easier for the unfamiliar to guess its meaning. (Google for Latin nunc English, for example.) "Prop..." just seems like it's too closely related to too many other concepts in English for it even to be recognizable as Latin-inspired.
11:56:46 PM   comment/     



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