Linguist Discovers New English Dialect, Realizes It's Just One Guy in Wichita

Sociolinguist Dr. Meredith Isogloss announced Tuesday that a distinctive set of lexical items she had been documenting in Wichita, Kansas — including 'frimble' (to walk without purpose), 'splooch' (a small but significant amount), and 'chunderly' (the weather condition of being overcast but not quite rainy) — does not represent a new English dialect, as she initially hypothesized, but rather the personal vocabulary of one man. 'I spent eight months collecting data,' Dr. Isogloss said. 'I interviewed forty-seven Wichita residents and identified forty-seven unique lexical items not found in any dialect atlas or regional dictionary. I was thrilled. I thought I'd discovered a previously undocumented speech community. Then I mapped the sources and every single word traced back to one informant: Dale Plimpton, 71, of East Wichita.' Plimpton, a retired mail carrier, has apparently been coining words for decades and introducing them into conversations with such confidence that his neighbors, coworkers, and family members adopted them without question. 'I've been saying "frimble" since the '80s,' Plimpton confirmed. 'People understood what I meant. I figured it was a word. Is it not a word?' Dr. Isogloss explained that while Plimpton's coinages are not recognized English words, they have achieved a level of local circulation that makes them 'functionally dialectal within a very small speech community.' The speech community in question consists of Plimpton, his wife, three neighbors, and a barista at a coffee shop he frequents. 'Dale is essentially a one-man dialect,' Dr. Isogloss said. 'In sociolinguistic terms, he's both the innovator and the entire adopter network. It's not a dialect. It's an idiolect with unusually good marketing.' Plimpton has expressed interest in having his words formally recognized. 'If Shakespeare can make up words, I don't see why I can't,' he said. 'He made up "assassination." I made up "splooch." Same energy.'