A Perfectly Cromulent Word (2016) | Hacker News Reader

A Perfectly Cromulent Word (2016)

merriam-webster.com

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It's always been one of my favourite Simpsons' jokes, precisely because it's so subtle.

And yes, I use both words all the time.

Words are just memes that stick around for a while.

“Unite humanity with a living, new language.”

My favourite example of this is "ok", which comes from a nearly 200 year-old meme:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-word-ok-was-in...

See also https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/thagomizer which has seen adoption.

"Grok" is quite commonly used verb which comes from a made up concept in Heinlein's "Stranger in a Strange land".

Grok is certainly a standard part of my lexicon.

what about grep?

generalized regular expression processor ?

Comes from the ed command ‘g/re/p’ (g: for each line matching; re: regular expression; p: print)

I reach for funner so often it's in my wordbag.

So... Is Embiggen a cromulent word?

It sure is.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/embiggen

A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man.

Interesting thing about "embiggen" -- the Simpsons _didn't_ invent it. It was already a thing, the show merely popularized it.

It's a century older.

Merriam may not know, but the OED does:

https://www.lexico.com/definition/embiggen

Yes but if it was not cromulent, what would you say instead?

If it were not cromulent, one might choose a less disputatious synonym, such as "enlarge".

For unwonted synonyms I usually refer to Thesaurus.

https://www.google.ru/search?q=oh+crap+it%27s+a+thesaurus&tb...

Perhaps mongol was fishing for

> A noble spirit encromulates the smallest man.

From page 28 of https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0610212

> For large P , the three-form fluxes are dilute, and the gradient of the Myers potential encouraging an anti-D3 to embiggen is very mild.

love made up words! this reminds me of "The Meaning of Liff", the "dictionary of things that there aren't any words for yet" by Douglas Adams & John Lloyd. here's an online version (with dubious legality?): http://www.lib.ru/ADAMS/liff.txt_with-big-pictures.html

I think it is all copacetic now.

Is “cromulent” a woody or a tinny word?

Woody.

(I just like the word. It gives me confidence. Gorn ... gorn. It's got a sort of woody quality about it. Gorn. Gorn. Much better than `newspaper' or `litterbin')

Is this related to the usage of cromulent in this submission?:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28641170

>First, btrfs is a perfectly cromulent single-disk ext4 replacement.

Or am I just getting that bias thing where because the word cromulent is now on my radar, I'm seeing it everywhere I look?

The later probably, cromulent was a word made up for a Simpsons episode about another made up work a while back

> a while back

Over 25 years ago, actually! Lisa the Iconoclast, which coined the words "embiggen" and "cromulent" as part of a gag, aired in February 1996.

Cromulent yes; embiggen no. See https://www.lexico.com/definition/embiggen

I used to have a t-shirt from a now-defunct television recap website that said “perfectly cromulent” and it was the best “in joke” shirt. Would always bring out the fellow Simpsons nerds.

This whole article gave me a fronache.

one of my favorite uses: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/tommy-needy-drinky

All words are made up

Oh, thank you for that.

This being a perfectly cromulent candidate to be entered into Merriam-Webster gives me great hope for tnettenba.

I'm not sure that's a word. Could you use it in a sentence?

Good morning, that's a nice tnettenba.

Is the addressee of the greeting naked or not?

You're supposed to just ask me what I'm wearing - you jumped the gun a little.

They just did!

I really want to make a joke about me wearing mine every day… But I also don’t want to contribute to the redditification of HN.

It embiggens us all.

Parent comment shouldn’t be downvoted. It’s cromulent, in an insider way.

(I’m not kidding. Same episode! Hint: 3F13.)

Such a cromulent suggestion and bigly of you.

This story has no byline or dateline.

Please don't do this.

Oh come on, this is a perfectly cromulent submission.

looks like it was first published in 2016

This is an interesting point. You're right - no byline or dateline. Not great things on a "News" platform.

But that begs the question: is Hacker News a "news" site? Despite having "news" in the name, I prefer to think of it more as a "Directory of Mostly Wonderful [Hacker] Things". At least, that's what I lurk here.

I see it like this: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

That use of “begs the question” is unfortunate. “Raises the question” would be more cromulent, provided that cromulence can be compared.

While some may accuse you of pedantry, I applaud your embiggening others' understanding of this common mistake.

I stand by "begs the question" - it's perfectly cromulent for all "intensive purposes". (/s ~ in all seriousness, I appreciate the correction!)

The cromulent way to describe HN is "news aggregator".

TIL that’s what those are called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byline

Makes sense since it’s a line that says who it’s by :v

Next they'll be trying to tell us that "figuratively" means "literally" Oh, wait, they literally did... or is that figuratively.

>While we don’t yet enter cromulent into our dictionaries, it’s a perfectly cromulent candidate for future entry.

Although the dictionary editors surely were hypnotized by their own humorousness, they ought not to have published that sentence.

Why not?

M-W's lexicographers openly discuss their process of descriptively documenting language as it's observed in real use. If usage of the word "cromulent" continues to grow to the point that it reaches the threshold for inclusion, it, by definition, belongs in the (descriptive) dictionary.

If we hold the M-W editors to the standard of only using "real" words, then a contradiction is present.

If "cromulent" has not yet reached their threshold for inclusion, then they themselves should not be using it in casual language. Contrapositively, if they are using it casual language, then presumably it has reached their threshold for inclusion as a word.

For them to casually use the word as though it were real after arguing that it is not harms their credibility as arbiters of what words are or are not real, despite the comedic value of them doing so here.

It's okay. The Oxford dictionary has them covered:

https://www.lexico.com/definition/cromulent

https://www.lexico.com/definition/embiggen

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