Slashdot Mirror
OED Science Fiction Database Updated
solferino writes "The Oxford English dictionary commenced a project back in 2001 (Slashdot report) to solicit reader citations of the earliest uses of science fiction words. The most recent OED newsletter covers the progress of the project, which has its own site hosted on a FreeBSD box running a MySQL database engine. An interesting graph on the site shows date of word origin by decade. Surprisingly recent words featured on the site are /avatar/ (1990 - in the VR sense) and /morph/ (1993) - unless the Slashdot readership can report earlier uses?"
Just a bizarre peak around 1940's.
Bombs falling, V2 rockets, mad dash for jet fighters... not surprising the entire culture is leaping into the future.
Scary shit, actually.
I wouldnt classify avatar and morph as "science fiction" words persay. Rather it might be more logical to classify them as "scientific" or "technological", because they are not just used in fiction but rather in everyday speech to refer to real things...
Post apocalyptic gaming goodness
Nukes, rubber substitutes, better explosives,...
Nothing like a world war to stimulate the imagination.
This story isn't that interesting... In any regard the graph does spark some thought. What accounts for the explosion of new words in the 30's/40's (pun sort of intended). I would have guessed the 20's would have been a more popular time.
mix_master_mike
vafrous
I can remember this word (in the sense of transform into another shape) from Scientific American articles of the late 80s. I wonder if that counts.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
I remember Morph being an oooold X-men villain, like late 70s or early 80s.
And his mutant ability was that he was a shapeshifter. He could morph into just about anything.
I don't think its "VR" but the 1980s Ultima series adventure games used Avatar to describe your character.
I searched for but could not find:
Bite my shiny metal ass
its full of stars
Spock, why does your underwear have three legs?
I don't think that this project is complete yet.
Humor from a Genetically Molested Mind
...in case of Slashdotting.
The Army reading list
Are they saying morph was not used until 1993? morph
In the future, these sites will be a great tool. Imagine in 100-200 years, there will be a map of the English language that is traceable to a degree not currently possible, and we'll all understand language patterns better. I have heard that something like 10% of Shakespeare is completely lost in translation due to changes in the language, so one can only imagine what a resource like this will be able to provide for future generations -- hopefully, there won't be as much cultural reinvention (i.e. the printing press: China -> Europe)
stuff |
It wasn't the war exactly.
It was the massive spending on R&D.
There was plenty of new development involved in the trips to the moon.
Some of the best "words" developed in the 1960s probably involved personal research and LSD trips.
"Morph" was a clay-mation character who appeared on UK kids tv from 1978 onwards. He was animated by Aardman Animations (who later went on to make "Wallace and Gromit" and "Chicken Run") and appeared on shows with Tony Hart (recently interviewed by b3ta)
Wasn't one of the functions of religion to explain scientific systems and phenomena? Weren't the stories of Gods on Olympus essentially science fiction for the audiences of the time? The observable forces of nature, as best understood at the time, duking it out for entertainment and fantasy purposes, but also closely tied with what was a more-or-less best-guess of scientific principals.
My question-- where do you draw the line between "science fiction" and mythology/religion?
A lot of the dates seem awfully late. For instance, for "cloaking device" they list 1996(!) and 1981 editions of books, while mentioning that, oh hey, Star Trek may have used the phrase "cloaking device" in the sixties, but we'd need to see the script to verify.
I don't understand: why does a usage have to be on paper to count for this project?
dinosaur comics
without much work, i found an *ancient* use of the word morph, as a verb.
google groups
of course, these may very well not match OED definitions of a good citation, but i would think you could then compare to other sources, like news papers and magazines.
it is exciting (being both a computer and language/words geek) to see such a project, though. it will surely keep the pressure on the OED to modernize and improve, as well as to accept other kinds of citations.
stored on computers from birth to the grave
Everyone knows the word Morph's first use in science fiction can be traced back to Lord Albiron's 1929 novel "Danger, Danger High voltage." Quoting from the 3rd edition (Bantam), p. 33, 3rd paragraph :
"Blast it Timmy!, that durn George Bush specimen has morphed into some kind dumb ass nucular monkey. They must be running some kind of avatar process on him."
I'll never forget the first time i read that.
HAD
It's really fascinating to do some exploritory research in to where various words in the english language are really derived. For example, the word person comes from the greek word personae, which means mask. Strange at first but once one realizes that in the greek tragedy's the actors wore "personae" to depict a certain character. The natural evolution was the adaptation of the word to represent an individual. Language has this tendency to move from concrete to abstract, some may feel this is offtopic but I think it's important to understand where our words come from. It helps you understand the memtic nature of a culture quite a bit more.
What is the earliest usage of the verb "to slashdot"?
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
I'm pretty sure the term avatar (for VR) predates 1990.
My first memory of the term "Avatar" being used to represent an online persona was on the online service Q-Link aka Quantum Link, a nationwide BBS system for the popular Commodore 64. (The parent company later became AOL.) They had a 2D graphics chat world called "Club Caribe" which I remember using the term "Avatar". (At the time, I thought it was a bit odd, since I was used to the term Avatar being used for the main character of Ultima IV (1985).) This would have been around 1988-1989 or so, which is earlier than the OED citation, although I do not have a printed source backup for this. (Check a C-64 magazine of that time period? Old copies of Compute Gazette, anyone?)
I've found a post from a MUD-Dev mailing list discussion thread held in 2001 on the same topic (what's the earliest use of the term avatar) that supports this recollection, and adds to it that the term might have been used by the predecessor of Club Caribe, Lucasfilm's Habitat (1984-1988), or possibly even earlier by Jaron Lanier. Again, no paper-based backup on this.
Regarding the term "morph", 1993 doesn't sound too far off; it might be a year or two earlier though. I ran across the term in late 1993 when trying to replicate the morphing process used by Michael Jackson's "Black or White" music video for a computer graphics class (based on a white paper by Pacific Data Images). Both that video and Terminator 2: Judgement Day which used morphing came out in 1992. The CG morphing technique was known as morphing when I took the class in 1993. I'm not sure the PDI white paper used the term morphing though, so maybe the term's name caught on some time after the video came out. So it might be 1993, but I wouldn't be surprised if the term was used in 1992.
--LP
However, this is the beginning of something that will be interesting in a couple decades. I'd like to see how these numbers change over time.
Right now we have a peak of new Sci Fi words from the 40s and 50s (about 50 years ago). The slope is shallow coming up to the present, but the drop off is steep to the 20s and earlier.
Does this mean it takes about 40-50 years for new words to work their way into a more main stream usage, but then they fall out of fashion quickly? If so, the shape of the graph would change little over time, just the years along the X-axis would advance.
On the other hand, this could mean peaks in new words correspond to peaks in scientific innovation or other social factors. What we see happening to language in the 40s and 50s could correspond to the heightened anxiety of WWII and the cold war. Or it could follow the historic changes to our fundamental understanding of the universe occurring during the first couple decades of the century.
Of course, none of that can be determined from this one snap shot. Nothing to see here folks...yet.
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is not a "typical" dictionary, for those of you who are not familiar with it.
I noticed several people mentioning concerns about the use of words prior to some of the dates mentioned and also about non-print use of words. The thing is, the OED attempts to define words as they have been used in printed literature. In other words, without the Star-Trek script that illustrates the use of the term "cloaking device", they cannot verify it and date it properly.
The thinking, if I am not mistaken, is based on the idea that a word in published print has gone through an editing process. The editor is then responsible for making sure that the words used in the final publication are valid and used accurately. The OED attempts to catalog any new words or new uses of existing words that appear after having gone through this process. The assumption being that any new words or new uses of words are now "valid" as a result of having been printed.
Whether you agree with this process is probably not relevant; but that is the way that I understand it to work.
If you would like more information you should read the book "The Professor and The Madman" by Simon Winchester. It's a great story that details how the OED came to be; and Mr. Winchester is a fine autor.
Is it really necessary to mention it's running MySQL and FreeBSD? I know this is a tech site, but geez; who cares how the database works, it's completely irrelevant to the article.
1p}{ 1 sp34k |33+ +|-|e|\| p30p13 \/\/il| 8e i/\/\pr3553|)
I received for Christmas, "The Meaning of Everything", by Simon Winchester. This gives a very interesting and compelling account of the genesis of the dictionary, some of the very strange characters who contributed and the process by which entries are constructed. A very interesting read.
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
The word "Morph" is Greek. Claiming it is a recently invented science fiction term is ludicrous. As is the word "Avatar", which is a sanskrit word for the embodiement of Vishnu.
It took me two seconds to find this information on dictionary.com. It baffles me how a site claiming to be affiliated to the OED could make such errors.
The 30's and 40's is when the science fiction magazines got started, and most of the authors whose works are considered "the classics" of science fiction got their start with those mags.
So they are the very definition of pedantic, big deal. Just show them one of the novelizations by James Blish or Alan Dean Foster (for the animated ones) that came out a couple of years later.
-Dave
That's because the character was an avatar in the traditional sense of the word; the plot of Ultima IV was the character's quest to become an embodiment and exemplar of the 8 virtues. It has nothing to do with the word "avatar" in the VR sense, which is the usage that is being discussed here.
avatar
n.
2. An embodiment, as of a quality or concept; an archetype: the very avatar of cunning.
It seems to me that they are missing "Grok." Seems rather strange that they would leave that one out. I use it on a daily basis, and so do most other people I know.
Hockey - Canada's gift to the world
The notion of human-shaped machines goes a lot further back than that - right back to Greek mythology. But such things were considered magic and/or supernatural: only with the Industrial Revolution did it become possible to think of machines that were manufactured, which is about the right date for a 1727 citation.
Even at that, robots remained nasty dangerous things-Man-wasn't-intended-to-know (cf Frankenstein) until the 20th Century, when writers like Capek created/popularized the concept (and the word, too: depends on who you ask), and Asimov depicted them as tools, designed for a purpose by engineers.
...laura, still a fan of Susan Calvin
Err ... nevermind. I Googled again and found it here. No "avatar".
...
Ignore the man behind the iron curtain
I believe my first recollection of Avatar was in Vernor Vinge's "True Names", published 1981. ("True Names & Other Dangers", a collection of short stories which included it, was published in 1987)
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
NM
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
This was easy enough to get as a google search (having seen the origin before)
The 1920 story/play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) Czech Author: Karel Capek, however his brother Josef is credited with coining the word.
I am unable to cite this correctly, not having the original publication, but am sending it off in any event.
It would seem even the simplest SciFi words should be considered for submission. So rack your brains then do a search.
(from the play, English translation, page 1):
On the right-hand wall are fastened printed placards:
"CHEAP LABOR. ROSSUM'S ROBOTS."
"ROBOTS FOR THE TROPICS. 150 DOLLARS EACH."
"EVERYONE SHOULD BUY HIS OWN ROBOT."
"DO YOU WANT TO CHEAPEN YOUR OUTPUT? ORDER ROSSUM'S ROBOTS":
Letter To Iran
In terms of computer graphics lingo, MORPH was developed by the special effects gurus at Lucasfilm in 1986/7 for the 1988 release of the Ron Howard film, Willow.
I think they even talked of how the word was developed in the making-of documentary.
I've got firsthand info from the man cited in the 5th paragraph (David Griffin) as to the validity of the OSS Software being used for both the OS and the DB. He is my co-worker and friend before that, and is not lying about his use of OSS. Furthermore, this is one of the few sites that's been slashdotted without being brought to it's knees, so that's got to say something?? :)
/. ... Apparently the server is doing just fine; processor load is a bit high but it's reponsive.
Apparently, Dave received word from the site owner (his friend is the cited editor of the OED) about his 5 minutes of fame on
This is my Sig.
Such as golems (from jewish folklore) and homunculi (people built by alchemists).
The notion of human-shaped machines goes a lot further back than that - right back to Greek mythology. But such things were considered magic and/or supernatural: only with the Industrial Revolution did it become possible to think of machines that were manufactured, which is about the right date for a 1727 citation
Also, even Capek's usage of the term "robot" isn't really our usage -- the "robots" of Capek's RUR were artifical (but still biological) humans, much like the replicants of Blade Runner.
Science fiction, under whatever name, goes back centuries. Cyrano de Bergerac wrote a story about a rocketship to the moon in 1657!
I think the crucial thing that happened in the 30s is that the English-speaking world started to be dominated by an industrial, rather than an agricultural, economy. As the population became more technical, so did its taste in adventure stories.
Submit these words to a free resource, not the OED - the OED is *SO* not free. WTF?