Lou's Commentary

How fast does a new word move on the web?

Wednesday, October 28th, 2009

Guest post: Senior Consultant Ed Fitzelle 

It’s no fun being a celebrity these days.  Keeping your name and picture in the headlines is not easy.  There is one sure fire way, however, to get ink, and that is to bear children or to adopt from a third world country.  Like over-sized handbags, lavish jewelry, and goofy hats, the baby bump is a sure fire way for a star to get noticed between films. 

For men, the question of how good of a celebrity father you are is cause for a paroxysm of coverage, especially if the relationship that originally sponsored the offspring has broken up or is on rocky ground.  Good is to be seen with lots of kids climbing all over you at some public function, better is to be seen heading to court with your lawyers in tow to assert your parental rights, and best is to bring the kid from the broken relationship to dinner with your new love interest.  Let’s just say that children in Hollywood, Washington, and New York have become accoutrements or very noticeable accessories for the people who show up regularly on the gossip shows.

Now to the point of this blog.  We aren’t just rambling on about the ethical or moral implications of this adoption of kid power by the power elite.  It would take someone with a far higher moral calling than me to do that.  The purpose here is not to express indignation, but to run a scientific experiment to test how a word can get diffused through the web.

Writers for tabloids and celeb mags love to coin words for shorthand references to celebrities and their lives.  Think of Branjelina or TomKat.  In that spirit then, we are offering up two coinages that we think will be quickly adopted by the working celeb press and offer them gratis for their use:

1. “ACCOUTREMENFANTS”  This term describes children acquired for headline purposes whether through natural causes like all the little kids appearing after photos of every stage of pregnancy by the mom-to-be have appeared at every supermarket checkout counter in the universe, or through legal means involving a foreign trip and the intervention of the U.S. State Department.

2. “ACCESSORIES-AFTER-THE-ACT”  This refers to children acquired the old fashioned way, only we think its most apt usage will be to describe the results of encounters for which there may have been an ulterior motive on the part of one of the participants.

So there you have it.  We are releasing these terms onto the ‘net, tagged like fish in a biologist’s field study.  As soon as you see one in print or hear it on a cable show, let us know.

 

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