Lexiempeiría

The nature of studying communication and its impact on society means highlighting the gaps of knowledge in the realm of the known that I’ve spent most of my adult life researching, critiquing, and explaining. I felt a particular knowledge gap was worth discussing in the postscript of my latest book, “Meme Life.” As we perceive it, existence depends on identifying the objects and concepts in our world and naming those objects and ideas. Names and words have this almost magical power to make the abstract real. Generally, this magical power would fit into the area of ontology. In the context of the book, memes are part of these naming actions.

“Memes have the capability to express emotions and ideas that we didn’t know how to communicate. We understand words have had this power for a long time.”

~”Meme Life” (pg. 262)

It was a struggle to articulate this concept within this book section beyond a theoretical discussion. After a day or so of trying to think of a way to tell the story of this idea, I remembered that Jon Stewart once described the power of stand-up comedy as that the comedian could take the random thoughts that were shared by others and turn it into a joke that would make an audience laugh. When talking about Jerry Seinfeld, Stewart once stated,

“He is able to comedically articulate an intangible for people. When they see it, [audiences] go… ‘gah it’s been in my head, and I know it’s been in there, but I’ve never put it together with that kind of rhythm in four levels, and that’s hilarious that you were able to articulate that.’ He’s a craftsman… of being able to craft those.. [intangible, esoteric things] and put them together into something that really connects with people.”

~Jon Stewart

That quote struck a nerve in my brain. It made me search for a word to describe when one discovers a word, phrase, or meme used by others that codifies and encapsulates an abstract idea that has been stuck in that person’s head. I couldn’t find such a word and gave up on the search to finish the book.

Months later, I’ve done several interviews supporting the book, and one of my interviewers let me down this rabbit hole again. I posted a question on social media to see if anybody knew the term I was describing. The request was the following:

“Dear Hivemind,
I know there’s a word that means something along the lines of “discovering there’s a word for this abstract idea I’ve had in my mind for a while.” Does anybody know the term I’m describing? The closest match I could find is Rich Hall’s “Sniglets,” however those seem to be made-up terms. I guarantee it’s not an English term.”

The suggestions I got were an epiphany, semantic triangle, the opposite of lethologica (on the tip of my tongue), vocabureka, hypothenym (“a hypothetical term”), and inkling. My social media friends are wise, but none of those terms felt like what I was looking for. My friend Mark Schmidt suggested that it was “time to make up our own word and kick it out into the wild!”

Okay, I am suggesting that this concept of discovering that others have named the abstract concepts in your mind should be called Lexiempeiría (λέξηεμπειρία, Greek for Word Experience, Lexi ~ Word + Empeiría ~ Experience). One of the reason I like this term is that it bridges the central tenet I was trying to communicate. The word (or phrase or meme) is encapsulating an experience that people make have been thinking about, but didn’t know how to articulate it clearly so that it would transmit that common abstraction to others.