As best as I can tell, I have spawned several neologisms that are now modestly viraling their way around the internet. They are: techlepathy, astrosociobiology and postgenderism.
Techlepathy gets 1,620 results in Google. Astrosciobiology gets 738 results, while postgenderism gets 511. Each word has a corresponding Wikipedia entry, but postgenderism redirects to an entry on me for some strange reason.
I first used the term 'techlepathy' in my Betterhumans article, “Evolving Towards Telepathy.” The other two were words that I had been using informally; I decided to flesh out the ideas in Wikipedia to see what would happen. Of the two, astrosociobiology has had the most work done to it terms of contributions and revisions. I believe that the term 'postgenderism' has been used before, but not in the same posthumanist/transhumanist context--more as a gender issues thing.
Some questions I have are: When does a word cease to be a neologism and become a bona fide word? Is Wikipedia correct in their stance against the posting of neologisms (which is why postgenderism redirects back to me)? Or are they reacting unfairly to new ways in which information emerges?
8 comments:
Welcome to the club. Ray Kurzweil in TSIN credits me with coining the word "singularitarian" in the early 1990's, which gets over 27,000 hits on Google.
Excellent, Mark -- I didn't know that.
Heh, I was thinking about that recently. The only thing that annoys me about wikipedia is the no-neologism rule. :/
I would imagine that the basis for acceptance by Wikipedia is that a word has gone into general usage. Most neologisms have a brief period of popularity with an interested minority and then fade away, never to be heard of again.
I would like to coin a new phrase:
"parascendant transvancement."
It's the state between Hyperchievement and Omnimentation.
http://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postgender
According to Fi-Wikipedia there is a finnish registered association called Postgender founded in 1994 "to promote postsexualism and postgenderism". The association started from philosopher Petri Sipilä's a street theatre group called Plastic Pony Picture Show which parodied the artificiality of gender roles.
I don't think the association has done much anything, or do they even have members these days, but still...
- Vizikahn
Excellent, thank you Vizikahn. These ideas are nothing new, going back to Donna Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto.
Indeed, welcome. I used to use a word for powergamers in roleplaying games back in the 80s, "Munchkin!" I believe it has a shot at becoming more than just a personal in-joke, one day...
As far as Wikipedia is concerned, I prefer to see new words that actually mean something -- it's not as though there aren't enough unused words and phrases out there already. For example, human enhancement, human optimization, self-actualization, personal evolution... there are plenty of names for the science and technologies of expanding the capabilities of sentient beings to superhuman levels. (Or metahuman, parahuman, transhuman, posthuman or ultrahuman levels...) But actually knowing that there's a word for such things -- and more to the point, knowing about all the various technologies and research efforts that fall under the heading of human augmentation -- could be very enlightening to someone with a very narrow view of this field. Which is why a muddled vocabulary does no one any good.
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