Introduction: The Logistics of Neologistics; Or, Bazooka is my hero!

As a graduate student in English literature, I have been trained in the arcane arts of making the silly appear plausible and/or strangely compelling, and "The Realm of Pseudo-Profundities" is where I try to see the world in new ways without the benefit of illegal substances. Think of this blog as a sort of "funhouse mirror of the soul," if you will.

I would have begun writing a blog weeks ago if I could think of a proper title. Even now, self-doubt gnaws at me like a toothless German babe on a Wienerschnitzel. It was not always like this. About an hour ago, actually, I was trying to think of a title, when I remembered a word I coined over a decade ago in my teen years, "Pseudo-Profundities!" It was my joyous cry of re-discovery, the new sight of a celestial light once seen by the Wordsworthian eye of youth but forgotten because I have become too wedded to this world. Regaining this memory offered the discovery of a vast country that had yet to be mapped, and like Donne, I cried, "before, behind, between, above, below, O, my pseudo-profundities, my newfoundland!" "Pseudo-profundities!" Ah, the word is both exclamation and petition, a cry of fulfillment and desire, of dream and deferment, of logos and lacuna. And if the province of the pseudo-profound was not wholly mine, the word itself was.

Upon sharing this epiphany with my wife (I mean the business about remembering the word, not all the meaty symbolism it had goin' on), she remarked that she doubted it was original. Imagine my horror staring at google.com to discover that many others had used my word! My word had been false to me! The sound of the word is now naught but "Pseudo-pseudo profundity," a pseudo-fidelity to the high fidelity stereo system that was my heart. It had allowed others to glimpse its lovely juxtaposition of syllables. In a Proustian moment of past recollection, I suddenly remembered the past infidelity of a name ...

Flashback: there is a boy in second grade drawing his own comic books. This boy is me and is not me, and the two of us merge while I remain wholly distinct and separable. His super-hero Bazooka stands proudly on the cover. Tears stain the page. "Why?" he cries. "I came up with your name! Me! Why did G.I. Joe take your name for one of their heroes who doesn't even look like you, a clear instance of nomenclatural misappropriation! Why?!!" He looks down. "Maybe ... maybe I can re-name you. I can call you 'Biggest Bazooka.' But I know it will never be the same."

Present day: It was never the same. Both the names "Bazooka" and "Biggest Bazooka" were forever tarnished, devoid of celestial charms, the shattering of a childhood ideal. Yet in hindsight, I recognize that Bazooka was never false to me. The true enemy is "the establishment." Bazooka was mine and taken from me. Even if we granted that G.I. Joe came up with the name beforehand (which is begging the question), the fact remains that I invented the name operating under a significant handicap: the inexperience of youth. I, an eight-year-0ld, ill-equipped for mastery of three-syllable words, matched wits with corporate executives and lost only because I was not born to a life of privilege, not born with a "silver bazooka in my mouth," if you will.

There are far-reaching consequences for our methodological assumptions in attribution of "inventions." Would it be fair to an eight-year old who invented something comparable to Bazooka--say, the telephone--to refuse to attribute the invention to him, simply because Alexander Graham Bell was privileged by society to be born in the 1800s? What about recognition of the eight-year-old's handicap? What about the recognition of the true genius that it takes to invent the super-hero name "Bazooka" at the age of eight, or to invent the term "pseudo-profundities" when merely a teenager? I don't care if Google book search lists "pseudo-profundities" as having been used in a book published in 1989. Was the writer who used the term a teenager? I think not; no, I think not. Admittedly, I am not a teenager either. But I was. And it seems unfair to penalize me now for something that I am not even being anymore. "The Realm of Pseudo-profundities" is not then simply about my personal relationship with a word; it is a manifesto, a summons to take down the establishment and erect something new, made by very smart teenagers and/or eight year olds, or by those who have been so in the past.