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The SFnal words are a bit more peripheral in this update, but nonetheless includes one of my favorite SF-sourced combining forms:

-zilla [from Godzilla, of course]:

With preceding noun, forming humorous, usually temporary words which depict a person or thing as a particularly imposing, relentless, or overbearing example of its kind.

First cite is for the form “hogzilla”, from 1978. Other forms attested include “bosszilla”, “bird-zilla”, “groomzilla”, “momzilla”, “thespzilla”. For more -zilla goodness, see The Tensor’s excellent post on this, way back in aught-five. And you can’t have a -zilla entry without one for the prime exemplar of its use, namely

Bridezilla

A woman thought to have become intolerably obsessive or overbearing in planning the details of her wedding.

First cite 1995.

Not particularly SF, but rather from fantasy, are to go flatline

(of an electrocardiogram, electroencephalogram, etc.) to display a flatline

which has a first cite from Stephen King’s 1979 The Dead Zone, and flatliner

A person who is in cardiac arrest or is brain-dead; a dead person

which has a note saying that it was popularized by the 1990 film Flatliners. (Interestingly, the entry for this sense of flatliner also says that it was originally North American medical slang, despite the first cite being some 1989 pre-press for the film. (And of course, the term will have particular resonance for fans of Neuromancer.)

Not genre-related in any way, shape, or form, but of interest to parents of very small children, are the entries for Ferber,

A strategy for training children to fall asleep on their own by gradually limiting intervention by caregivers.

and Ferberize (with Ferberizing run-on),

To use the Ferber method or a similar technique to train (a child) to fall asleep independently.

I’ve been falling behind with my updates of SF words in the OED, I fear.  This quarter’s update (for those of you not keeping score at home, the OED is in the process of a complete revision, and publishes quarterly updates of new and revised entries which pretty much always makes for fascinating reading) doesn’t have much of SFnal interest — just two words by my count: clone and skinsuit.

clone, n. 2. a. Chiefly Science Fiction. Any member of a hypothetical population of artificially produced, identical people, aliens, etc. Also: a duplicate of a living person.

First citation is from Alan Toffler’s Future Shock (1977). Interestingly, none of the citations are from actual SF, although three of the citations are reviews or discussions of SF works.

skinsuit n. any of various types of (usually one-piece) suit made of elasticated material which fits tightly to the body, esp. one designed for a particular sport.

Note that this definition rolls up the SF sense of skinsuit (a tight-fitting spacesuit, often intended for short-term or emergency use) with the sporting sense (as in that garment that short-track speed skaters wear). Their first citation is from 1956in a diving context, which handily beatsBrave New Word‘’s 1971 citation from Keith Laumer’s Dinosaur Beach.

is more lolxicography! In honor of Dictionary Day (look it up), I present you with these new lolz.  (Old lolz iz here.) (Click the images if you’re confused.)

Whilst browsing at a lovely, if overpriced, purveyor of organic and green home furnishings in my new home town of Berkeley (what? oh yes, I moved — hence, in part, the long dry spell of posts), I noticed a greeting card with the word “Grok” on it in large, friendly letters, with a definition and usage notes on the reverse. (It’s worth noting that the usage notes refer only to the sense of the word as used in Stranger in a Strange Land, and not as it’s come to be used in English, although I do find it rather charming that they wrote it as if Martian were a real language.) This is part of a line of cards with words from various languages, my favorite of which is Mamihlapinatapai, a Yaghan word apparently meaning “A meaningful look between two people, expressing mutual unstated feelings.” They also have one in Klingon, rounding out their SF linguistic credentials quite nicely.

A while back, I was musing on the definitions of horror, and wondering if there wasn’t something missing from the standard definitions — namely that I had a sense that there was a def. of horror that basically included anything involving vampires, werewolves, et al. (as opposed to the standard definition of including works that seek to instill fear in the reader or viewer) — although I lacked any evidence other than my own impressions. Well, Locus magazine has come to my rescue, in the form of the Feb. 2008 issue’s recommended reading discussion. In it, editor-in-chief Charles N. Brown discusses the various categories they use for recommendations and such:

As with bookstores, we’ve been listing anything with vampires and werewolves as horror, and anything with witches and magic as fantasy.

So there exists at least one place where this definition has been used. But he says it as a prelude to a change in policy:

Chicklit witches and other supernatural creatures don’t really make it as fantasy, and romantic vampires and werewolves don’t make it as horror. They need their own category.

This pretty much backs up my impression of the broader sense of horror: it’s used as a convenience, because you have to call these books (i.e., the non-horrific horror books) something, and in the case of a bookstore, you absolutely have to put them somewhere. This also makes me wonder if my impression about this use of horror comes partly from my having worked for Locus once-upon-a-time, and having internalized their standards; it certainly has a basis in having shelved the genre books at a bookstore. Lexicographically speaking, of course, this is nowhere near enough evidence to support including this def. in a dictionary, but it does at least a) prove that I’m not crazy (at least in this one regard), and b) suggest that it’s worth pursing this question to see how common the usage is.

I have a guest-blog at OUPblog today (I’m pinch-blogging for Ben Zimmer), about organleggers and organlegging. Pop on over and take a look!

The other thing about definitions of horror that bothers me (and this goes for my own definition in BNW), is that I have this inkling that something is being left out. I get the sense, based largely on visits to bookstores and libraries, and to a lesser extent, book reviews, that “horror” is applied to works of fiction that merely partake of the furniture of horror (vampires, ghosts, werewolves, elder gods, the word “eldritch”, etc.), but which are not particularly evocative of the emotion of horror (fear, shock, dread, etc.). And I mean that they are not evocative of these feelings by authorial choice, as opposed to, say, bad writing. For example, the Laurel K. Hamilton “Anita Blake” series of books, which is about a vampire-hunter, and includes all kinds of were-beasts and whatnot, is primarily (at least in the later installments) erotic in nature, and not particularly fear-inducing. But her books are almost invariably shelved in the horror sections of book stores.

Wikipedia’s entry for horror fiction includes this sentence: “Since the 1960s, any work of fiction with a morbid, gruesome, surreal, or exceptionally suspenseful or frightening theme has come to be called ‘horror’.” This could possibly be interpreted as supporting my hypothesis, in that works that are merely “morbid,” “gruesome,” or “surreal” are not necessarily written to induce feelings of horror. But that’s the closest I can come to finding a citation that supports my inkling. Reviews are not especially useful for this sort of defining, since, unless one has actually read the work under review, it’s hard to know which sense the reviewer intends; in the absence of evidence, the standard definition is safest to apply, although, as I said, I’ve seen reviews that give me the impression that the use of “horror” might be broadening. (And unfortunately, I didn’t save any, and don’t even recall what works were under review, so it’s entirely possible that I’m imagining novel uses in my spare time. But I don’t think I am.) Time will tell, I suppose.

I’ve been thinking about the genre of horror lately (hence the clever title of this post), and more particularly why it’s so poorly defined in most dictionaries. I defined horror in BNW as “a genre of fiction, film, etc in which the object is to instill a feeling of fear in the reader or viewer”. One could probably quibble about whether or not fear is the only feeling involved, but I think it’s pretty good, as far as it goes. But most dictionaries fail to define “horror” as a genre at all, which I find puzzling, since it’s been used in this way since at least the early 20th Century. (BNW includes a 1900 citation for “tales of horror”, which could be interpreted as being simply descriptive and not referring to a genre or category, and a 1917 citation reading in part, “those who enjoy horror, tales overflowing with blood and black mystery”, which is pretty clearly referring to a category of fiction.) I should also note that I’m limiting my criticism to dictionaries aimed at native speakers; learners’ dictionaries obviously have different inclusion criteria.

What they do (usually) include is either an adjective (i.e., “calculated to inspire feelings of dread or horror : bloodcurdling <a ~ movie>” [Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 11th Edition]) or compound form (i.e., “horror film”, “horror comic”, etc.). Either way is a perfectly fine way to treat this usage, but neither choice correctly treats horror as a genre. It’s like having an entry for “science fiction novel” but not “science fiction”. (It’s worth mentioning here that the American Heritage Dictionary is the only major dictionary I checked that doesn’t define horror as a literary mode in any manner, although I haven’t looked at the latest version of the 4th ed.) The exceptions to this sad state of affairs are the Oxford dictionaries. The New Oxford Dictionary of English and New Oxford American Dictionary both define horror thus (example sentences and irrelevant subsenses elided): “1. an intense feeling of fear, shock, or disgust. [...] a literary or film genre concerned with arousing such feelings.” And the Shorter OED, 5th Ed., which defines it as “a genre of literature etc. designed to excite pleasurable feelings of horror by the depiction of the supernatural, violence, etc.” (This def. was first used in the New Shorter OED, aka the 4th edition, in 1993.) The other exception is Wiktionary, the dictionary sibling of Wikipedia (their definition is “A literary genre, generally of a gothic character”, which I don’t think quite captures the essence).

So why is this? I don’t know. One possibility that occurs to me is that the word “horror” is used in this way primarily within SF/F/H circles, although I’m pretty sure it’s also used this way by publishers and booksellers, but maybe the generic sense is perceived as being too confined to certain realms of discourse to meet most dictionaries’ requirements for inclusion. But because some of the best-selling authors in the world write horror (not to even get into films and video games), and therefore get notice in the mainstream press, I would be surprised if this were really true. (That 1917 quote I gave above is from the New York Times Book Review, for example.) It would be interesting to see how other genres are treated, and whether there’s a pattern of omitting genres in general, or whether it’s just horror that’s being slighted thus. But that’s another project for another day.

The OED’s quarterly update of new and updated entries always makes for entertaining reading (especially if you can get access to the online version; I get it through the San Francisco public library’s website — it’s free to anyone with a library card, and all California residents are eligible; if you’re a CA resident and happen to be visiting SF, it’s well worth your time to get a card!). I always scan it for SFnal words, and the latest batch has some interesting ones.

First off is fembot, which is defined as “A robot resembling a woman in appearance. Also in extended use: a woman characterized as a robot.” This is probably most familiar from the Austin Powers movies, but the first citation is from the Oct. 24, 1976 Fresno Bee, regarding an episode of The Bionic Woman. Somewhere, there must still be a Steve Austin/Jaimie Sommers fandom which would be able to tell us whether the word was used in an episode, or whether it was the reporter or somebody in marketing who came up with the term.

Next is the venerable FTL, which they list as an adjective (and “also as adv.”), and which I decided was an abbreviation. They only go back to 1964, even though both BNW and the SF Citations Project take it back to 1950.

Less directly SFnal, but interesting nonetheless is galactically. The primary sense (”With regard to a galaxy or galaxies; in galactic terms.”) goes back to 1903 in a non-SF use. The entry for the second sense (”To a vast extent or degree; hugely, immensely.”) strikes me as odd because the first citation they give for it is from an Ursula K. Le Guin novel (The Dispossessed), and to my eye looks like a strictly literal use in the first sense. But you decide: “After all you’re a world-famous—a galactically famous scientist!”  It  does, I suppose,  mean ” to a vast extent” in this context, but mostly it means that the scientist is actually famous throughout the galaxy, or “in galactic terms.”

Finally, we come to silver surfer, a term which is perhaps only marginally SFnal. It refers to “an elderly or retired person who uses the Internet,” and is a reference in part to the Marvel comic book character, Silver Surfer, and in part to the sense of “silver” referring to the color of hair “when white with age”.

Erin McKean writes about the competitive sport of antedating in the Boston Globe.