While researching the word “curmudgeon” the other day I came across a concept I had not seen before: nonce words. a nonce word is one that is made up to be used for a singular purpose, for example testing children on sentence and word structure.
In this case the nonce word “cril” doesn’t mean anything and is just a teaching mechanism for how you make something plural in English.
Some nonce words claw their way into the language by happenstance and usage. There is this amazing story from the world of particle physics with the unlikely pairing of Irish writer James Joyce and physicist and Nobel Laureate Murray Gell-Mann. The story goes that Gell-Mann, in search of a name to give the basic building block of all things, came across this line from Joyce’s “Finnegan’s Wake”:
Three quarks for Muster Mark! Sure he has not got much of a bark And sure any he has it’s all beside the mark.
Gell-Mann was thinking of naming his new most elementary of all particles a “quork”, but changed it to “quark” based on his reading of Joyce. Quark stuck and is now an established part of the language and is no longer a nonce word. Of course when Joyce wrote Finnegan’s Wake this was the furthest thing from his mind, although given the impenetrable nature of this work, I wonder for whom Joyce was writing.
Particle physicists, apparently.
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