All Things Linguistic

I think my favourite has to be:

He swaggered into the room (in which he was now the “smartest guy”) with a certain Wikipedic insouciance, and without skipping a beat made a beeline towards Dorothy, busting right through her knot of admirers, and she threw her arms around him and gave him a passionate though slightly tickly kiss, moaning softly, “Oooohh, Scarecrow!” (David S. Nelson)

“Wikipedic insouciance”, everyone. Wikipedic insouciance. This is my new favourite phrase.

Linguistically, this is a cute example of productive derivation from a brand name, in the same vein as “googled”, and it’s interesting that the meaning of “wikipedic” appears to be not the fairly-obvious “pertaining to Wikipedia” but rather “knowing a lot”, which says interesting things about the perceived authority of Wikipedia. (Urban Dictionary has a similar definition, but more focussed on trivia.)

Bulwer-Lytton is a contest for “badly”-written prose (see also Lyttle Lytton). But the winning sentences are most emphatically not bad on several counts: they generally follow prescriptivist rules for written English structure, spelling, and punctuation. They are not rambling, incoherent, or dense, and in fact often evoke a vivid and humorous mental picture. Their “badness” seems to arise instead from incongruity of imagery or register. For example, this year’s winner juxtaposes love and eyelash mites: 

As he told her that he loved her she gazed into his eyes, wondering, as she noted the infestation of eyelash mites, the tiny deodicids burrowing into his follicles to eat the greasy sebum therein, each female laying up to 25 eggs in a single follicle, causing inflammation, whether the eyes are truly the windows of the soul; and, if so, his soul needed regrouting. (Cathy Bryant)

And a previous winner juxtaposes formal written English with internet memetalk:

 ”The evil Intergalactic Emperor surveyed the destruction he wrought. ‘Booyah!’ he cried with glee. ‘I’m in ur base! I’m killing all ur mans!’ ” (James Wall)