"coin" = to call; dub; name;

[Jonathan Lighter]

That's right, Ben. But I think Grant makes a good point. "To coin a phrase" is now mostly used ironically to characterize an obvious cliche'.

  It may be that people are assuming that "to coin" a phrase really means "to allude or refer to" a well-known phrase.

  In that case, "coin" may also be definable as "to refer to," not quite synonymous with "dub."

  JL

Benjamin Zimmer <bgzimmer at BABEL.LING.UPENN.EDU> wrote:
  ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Benjamin Zimmer
Subject: Re: "coin" = to call; dub; name;
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

On 10/10/06, Grant Barrett wrote:
>
> On Oct 10, 2006, at 11:28, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
> > A reporter on Fox News has reminded us this a.m. that Jennifer
> > Wilbanks "was coined 'The Runaway Bride.' "
>
> I've had my eye on this for a while and did a blog entry about it in
> January:
>
> http://www.doubletongued.org/coined
>
> The gist of it is that the new "to coin" means that there's a problem
> with disambiguation, where person A says "He coined the word..."
> meaning, "he said something significant; gave something/one a name;
> or or called someone/thing by a name" but person B thinks they mean
> "He was the first person ever to have used that word or turn of phrase."
>
> In discussing this with others, I've come to believe this
> transformation of meaning is due to the cliche, "to coin a phrase,"
> especially when it, too, is being taken literally.

That's a bit different from Jon's point, which is that "coin" is now
creeping into the class of "dub verbs" (as Beth Levin calls them), as
in "The media dubbed/called/coined her 'The Runaway Bride.'" (Or does
it only work in the passive, "She was coined..."?)

See this Language Log post for more on the "dub" verb class:

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003016.html


--Ben Zimmer

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