I started writing this last night holed up in a corner of my bedroom in Barcelona, ears tightly plugged. How on earth can people get a kick out of creating deafening bangs and crashes, I grumbled to myself. I just don’t understand. For it was La Nit de Sant Joan (St John’s Night – the summer solstice festival, tweaked by the Catholic Church to fall on day of birth of St John the Baptist) aka Nit de Foc, Night of Fire, when bonfires are lit, and people throw firecrackers and rockets and other horrid exploding things around out in the street and the playground my apartment overlooks - for fun.
Why?
Can’t I find something - anything - to love about this hellish extravaganza,
The words! The English! The playful process of creation!
Just like ‘pop’ which I raved about in my first post here, these noise words are examples of onomatopoeia: the making of words by imitation of sounds; the naming of something by reproducing the sound it makes or a sound associated with it.
(BTW for etymology geeks (me!) onomatopoeia is from Late Latin, originally from Greek onoma (genitive onomatos) = word, name + a derivative of poiein = to compose, make (cf poet, poem).
And like pop, they not only survive but thrive… boom boxes and zap guns and clickbait and slamgates and Whizz Air and… these will have to be for another post.
Because before I got triggered by the fireworks, I was editing a piece about a particular ‘natural noise word’ that’s versatile, expressive and energy-efficient, packing a big punch with just one easy-to-utter syllable.
Wow! started life as a ‘natural sound’ expressing wonder, amazement or great pleasure. Technically -- like Ouch! Ugh! Phew! Grrr! – it’s an interjection, that is, a part of speech that expresses emotion and is capable of standing alone: it usually has no grammatical connection to the rest of the sentence. According to my research, wow! is Scottish in origin and dates to 1513, which refers to when it was first recorded not when first uttered.
But unlike many interjections, wow has taken on a life of its own and achieved full wordhood. (In an upcoming post we’ll look at some other quirky ones that have also flourished).
In English you can use wow as almost any part of speech.
You can:
Wow your audience / boss / followers / partner
Wow your prospects into buying your product
Make a fortune writing self-help books with titles like The Wow Principles, How to Unleash the Magic Wow Factor, or Find Your Wow, Live Your Dream.
Be so blown away by your new cutting-edge thingamajig that words fail you – it’s quite simply ‘the ultimate wow’.
But there’s more: wow has astounding derivational possibilities (meaning you can add other bits to create many different words). You can
Wowify your brand
Make people’s jaws drop in absolute wowification
Create a wow-o-meter for your clients to rate the wowability of your products
Set up an exclusive wowerati community
Have – wait for it - now we’re positively hyperventilating – the greatest wowgasm of all time
Isn’t it a truly wowsome example of the Stuff English Does?
Please pop your own wow! words, book titles and other genius ideas into the comments.