The folks who compile the Oxford English Dictionary (henceforth OED) think a lot about English words, and what qualities are necessary to make an utterance count as a word. I’ve found it rewarding to browse the guidance and materials they release as part of this process. For example, I really enjoyed their article on word frequency bands and their characteristics. Earlier this year, this instinct led me to learn about their schema for how a weird sound that falls out of someone’s mouth, or a calculated keysmash that falls out of someone’s brain, becomes a real, certified word. (In this case, the certification involves inclusion in the OED.)

Let’s say that I, a humble blogger, write a thinkpiece about how TV seasons optimize for fictional parasocial relationships, which are good to cultivate. I jocularly coin the term “pseudoparasocial” within. They would call that a coinage. Other lexicographers might call it a hapax legomenon, a Greek term for a word that appears only once. Hapaxes and their cousins can also be a fun topic to learn about if you’re the kind of person who reads articles like this one.

If I really like the sound of my own voice when I say “pseudoparasocial” and start injecting it into conversation, that term is now part of my idiolect. (If you like the sound of my voice, could I interest you in using the term neoretrofuturism to refer to cyberpunk?) I use it, and people understand me as well as they usually do, but no one else uses it.

If the term catches on in my friend group, and has enough memetic fitness that they also start using it in their friend groups, it might eventually become a regionalism after a few successful hops. Instead of my friends and their friends, if it were my colleagues and their colleagues, the term might instead begin to be considered jargon.

Once it’s gained enough cultural cachet that other bloggers begin to write thinkpieces about the term “pseudoparasocial”, they’d call it a neologism. Most other dictionaries would include the term as a word at this point, but not the OED. A work that aspires to define every word that has ever been written in the English language, in all of history, must have stricter critieria for inclusion to avoid getting swamped. So it is only if the term has enough staying power to maintain its cachet for a few years that their elite lexicographers would deem it a word.

I find myself comparing and contrasting this wordification pipeline with the path a work takes to enter the American cultural canon. In this instance, what I mean by “cultural canon” is the set of media that everyone knows that everyone knows. Some examples from the late 1900s might be Terminator and Jurassic Park. The ruby slippers from the Wizard of Oz or Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. It’s no mean feat for a work to become well-known enough that it enters the zeitgeist, but the vast majority of those works do not then go on to become part of the cultural canon. One thing all four of the works I mention have in common is, they were all made before a hypothetical 25-year-old American was born. Works that successfully make it into the cultural canon need to somehow cross that vast chasm, somehow convincing people it’s worth their time to watch a thing their parents watched.