Thanks Chris. Seems I'm a bit behind (around 13 years!) in my Simpsons!
I learn more every day - so how about that:-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_the_Iconoclast
Embiggen and cromulent
The episode features two newly-coined words:
embiggen and
cromulent.
[2] The show runners asked the writers if they could come up with two words, which sounded like real words and these were what they came up with.
[4] The
Springfield town
motto is "A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man." Schoolteacher
Edna Krabappel comments that she never heard the word
embiggens until she moved to Springfield. Miss Hoover, another teacher, replies, "I don’t know why; it’s a perfectly cromulent word." Later in the episode, while talking about Homer’s audition for the role of town crier,
Principal Skinner states, "He's embiggened that role with his cromulent performance."
Embiggen—in the context it is used in the episode—is a verb that was coined by
Dan Greaney in 1996.
[2] The verb previously occurred in the 1884 publication
Notes and Queries: A Medium of Intercommunication for Literary Men, General Readers, Etc by C. A. Ward, in the sentence "but the people magnified them, to make great or
embiggen, if we may invent an English parallel as ugly. After all, use is nearly everything."
[8] The literal meaning of
embiggen is
to make something larger.
[9] The word has made its way to common use and was included in Mark Peters
Yada, Yada, Do'h!, 111 Television Words That Made the Leap From the Screen to Society.
[10] Specifically,
embiggen can also be found in
string theory. The first occurrence of the word was in the journal
High Energy Physics in the section
Gauge/gravity duality and meta-stable dynamical supersymmetry breaking, which was published on January 23, 2007.
[11] Later it was used in the journal
Nature. In the context of string theory it means
to grow or expand.
[12]
Cromulent is an adjective that was coined by
David S. Cohen.
[2] Since it was coined, it has appeared in the
Webster’s New Millennium Dictionary of
English.
[13] The
etymology of
cromulent is inferred only from its usage, which indicates that it is a positive attribute. Webster's Dictionary defines it as meaning
fine or
acceptable.
[13]
