More than 60 Seconds with Paul McFedries

Read the original, expurgated version of this article.

Paul McFedries is a neologist, a linguist's answer to Indiana Jones. He digs through the cultural strata, classifying new words in our evolving lingo. McFedries, 44, has devoted nine years to the hunt, and his new book, Word Spy (Broadway Books, 2004) is the result. Fast Company dusted off its best thesaurus and got his take on "Y2OK," "boomeritis," and Google-as-verb. This is an expanded interview offered as a Web Extra to the original print article.

Fast Company: You got a BA in math, spent the '80s in a cubicle, and now you've got 40 books... what got you into writing?

Paul McFedries: I was the sales manager for this division of computer books, and I had to write a little manual for the sales reps to use. I really enjoyed it. I thought it was fun to take a reasonably complex series of steps or operations and reduce them to something simple that anybody could understand. That was back in 1990, and I just started writing full time.

FC: Have you always had a passion for words?

McFedries: Oh, I always liked language. I remember in high school being a little conspicuous because of it. It's the William F. Buckley syndrome--if you use words that people don't understand, they look at you funny. It does tell you a lot about society--the language is growing, but it's also shrinking; everyone's using the lowest common denominator. It's a language that's got almost 1 million words and most people use an average of 10 or 15 thousand.

FC: How do you hunt new words? Do you just search databases?

McFedries: Well, I read a lot. Books, magazines, newspapers. Anywhere from 2-6 hours a day. I could spend a whole day doing it if there's nothing else on the go. I've trained myself to look for new words. Or sometimes I'll just think of a word and wonder if anybody has come up with it. For example, right after Y2K, when nothing much bad happened, I thought "Y2OK" would be an interesting phrase. So I did a search on LexisNexis, and sure enough, people had used it. You know, I think I found 3-4 different uses for it, so I put that one on the site. Making up a new word--anybody can do it. I see it as the most democratic of creative acts.

FC: What are some unusual places you might search, places you find yourself that you might never have suspected?

McFedries: I don't have any unusual places that are regular haunts; it's more wherever the links go. When you do a search, you find yourself in unusual places. You have to have a kind of mindless patience. You end up in some strange little corners that you never knew existed. Generally, new words tend to come from the media, big and small, even if it's just an obscure zine. They're out there--they're in some sort of distributable medium like an e-zine, or a newsletter, or some sort of press release even. I think you're seeing now a lot of terms are coming up in chat rooms and IM sites and newsgroups... message boards. More often than not, it's not recorded, especially if it's an IM conversation or a voice conversation. The birth of most words isn't set in stone or electrons.

FC: Is there a word for a writer or journalist who is always pumping out new words?

McFedries: I don't think there is a word for someone who does that because it's so rare. It's just really, really hard to come up with a new word that people accept and use. Shakespeare is attributed to have created 1,200-1,500 words; it's just incredible. The next best person might have 10. There's a story in my book about the guy who created this word "Frankenfood"--Paul Lewis--and with the media frenzy that accompanied that, he had his 15 minutes. But I guess he wanted another 15 minutes. So he just kept trying to come up with these new words and was striking out every time. They just didn't click.

FC: With so many new words or new terms, are there an equal number or old words and terms flowing out of the language?

McFedries: It's hard. You can't pin down the death of a word. Sometimes words will go away for a while and come back. I know the most recent addition of Merriam-Websters had something like 10,000 new words--so they can't keep getting bigger, they have their own page-count restrictions.

FC: Do you see words springing from media events? Do they ride the news?