Clever, self-explanatory coinages rarely catch on, while allusive phrases whose meaning has to be inferred travel widely.
Sailer stated it on his blog in December 2012 from an observation about the Atlantic Monthly, which for years ran a back-page contest inviting readers to invent words for unfilled needs in the language. It published hundreds of them and he never encountered one of them again. Against that he set "jump the shark", which spread widely while being entirely opaque, since it requires knowing about an episode of Happy Days. The implication is that transparency is the wrong property to optimise for, and that a name needs a hook rather than a definition.
In practice
- A firm that names its internal process for exactly what the process does finds staff still using the nickname somebody coined in a meeting.
- A committee choosing between the precise term and the memorable one is choosing between being understood once and being repeated.
- Possible explanations
- The proposed explanation is effort and status: a coinage whose meaning must be inferred rewards the person who gets it, which gives them a reason to use it, while a self-explanatory one offers no such reward.
- In its favour
- The magazine contest that prompted it is a striking case, since decades of deliberately clever coinages produced almost nothing that entered general use.
- Against it
- It was stated as a law from a single example and has not been tested, though it is testable in principle by coding coinages for transparency against their later spread.
- Standing
- Stated as a law from a single example, and not tested, though it is testable in principle by coding coinages for transparency against their later spread. Minimally counterintuitive concepts, content bias and cultural attractors each supply a mechanism that would predict much the same pattern. It also cuts against the advice in Mill's Handle that a good name should be self-explanatory.
- Subject
- Communication & Media
- Essay
- What happens to a message after it is sent