It may be time for ‘pongroid’

By the end of April, the English language will be 1 million words strong. At least it will be if you believe the Global Language Monitor, an organization that uses people combined with computer algorithms (and, for all I know, chicken entrails tossed into a fairy circle during a full moon) to track trends in language around the world.

According to the Texas-based organization, English picks up a new word every 98 minutes -- about 15 a day -- or just enough to make my spellchecker feel really dumb. The Global Language Monitor doesn’t say anything about words being kicked out, so we can assume that English is the pack rat of languages and only gets bigger.

I’m not sure what most of the new words popping up every 98 minutes are, but I’m sure they’re along the lines of “repurpose,” “ginormous,” “hella” -- and its grade-school equivalent, “hecka” -- and “Obamalovefest,” which may not make it, depending on whether bankruptcy becomes the leveraged buyout of the decade.

A million words is way more than any dictionary includes. Most standard dictionaries define about 200,000 words. The Oxford English Dictionary (motto: “More words than you can shake a cudgel at”) has about 600,000. That means either the Global Language Monitor has heard words the Oxford people haven’t, or it stopped counting after “obfuscation,” or it knows no one is going to go down the list and count them all.

A million seems like a lot of words. But if you figure there are about 1.35 billion people who speak English, that’s only one word for every 1,350 speakers. I don’t know about you, but I’d hate to find out I was one of those people who didn’t have his own word, though should that happen, I’d make one up just so I could feel important. Maybe a word such as “grobwich.” Or “pongroid.” If I can persuade the Global Language Monitor to recognize these, then I will have gotten us to Million Word Day a bit sooner.

But the question is, do we really need a million words? The typical American knows about 20,000 words but uses only 7,500 of them in a given day. This means that on most days, we have 12,500 unused words gathering dust in the crannies of our cerebellum. That being the case, what could we possibly do with 980,000 more of them? As it is, I’m afraid that if I stuff one more thing into the right side of my head, my Social Security number’s going to fall out my left ear.

The Global Language Monitor estimates that the millionth word will show up near April 29, but it could be as soon as March 30, which makes it difficult to plan a Million Word party. But while we’re waiting for another ginormous number of hella repurposed words to join the language, maybe we’ll be lucky enough to come across another, uh, classic -- like grody, Y2K or macarena. How pongroid!