View from the North 40: Nothing like a little research to get your blood pumping

Nerds look things up, that’s who we are — sometimes that more for worse than for better.

It started with “confab,” as in this simple reply: “That sounds fun, but John and I will have to confab on this before we commit to anything.” And all of a sudden, I realized that I don’t really use the term “confab” in everyday speaking and felt I needed to make sure I was using it correctly. Also, it sounded like an abbreviation of a longer word, like confabulation, so obviously I had to fire up two windows for two Google searches.

That all sounds innocently nerdy enough, right? And, yeah, kind of boring. This is my life, me blah-blah-blahing words and looking stuff up on the internet of things — and to be honest that was true of pre-COVID life, too.

So I looked up confab, and Oxford Languages — “the world’s leading dictionary publisher, with over 150 years of experience” — says (with the British accent of your choice) that, yes, confab is an abbreviation of confabulate/confabulation and means “n. an informal private conversation or discussion” and in North America “n. a meeting or conference of members of a particular group.” As a verb it is to “engage in informal private conversation.” It’s an “easy conversation” or a “chat.” That’s nice. Right?

Oxford Languages said all of this has been true since the early 18th century. I was happy at this point, fine as frog hair, knowing that I had used the word correctly. Pip-pip, tut-tut, and serve it with an Earl Grey tea, poppet.

But I kept reading and researching — because that’s what I do, like an OCD tic that makes me wish I would just wash my hands a lot and, I don’t know, count floor tiles or touch the top of every door jamb I pass through. Because now, now I know there came a German invasion almost 200 years later.

A German psychiatrist named Karl Bonhoeffer co-opted the term and really messed things up — as if English needed any help with that. He decided to use confabulate to mean “fabricate imaginary experiences as compensation for loss of memory.”

So just in case you’re really bored and not keeping score here — as of the beginning of the 20th century the same word means both “a conversation or meeting among a few people or closed group” and almost the polar opposite of “spewing a great big wad of dookey-doo and made up B.S. or outright lies because you have a medical issue in your brain, or you can’t be bothered to discover what the real event or information was.”

Don’t get me wrong. I am very sympathetic about the medical issues, but it doesn’t show because I’m also very aggressively bewildered by the fact that the psychiatrist, of all the words he could’ve used, chose one that already didn’t mean what he was describing.

He’s German, for crying out loud, one of the basic principles of the official German language is that if you want to name something new, you just cram a bunch of other words together until you have something new.

Kraftfahrzeughaftpflicht-versicherung? That’s just “motor vehicle indemnity insurance.”

Volkswagen? The “people’s car” or, if you use Google Translate “people venture.” That’s kind of cool, or if you’ve ever owned one you might call it “people’s perpetual mechanicking project.”

What about that weight you put on stress eating during the pandemic? That’s kummerspeck, which literally translates to “grief bacon.” What?! Awesome!

Couldn’t Bonhoeffer have come up with something like “memory fabrication speaking” — gedächtnisfabrikationsprechen. It’s no grief bacon, but it isn’t word misappropriation either.

And if you think my brain is a bit tizzied over this, you should’ve seen me when I realized that farther down the screen I had a link to the definition of “conflab,” which was the same as “confab.” At that point, I dragged out my big book of words, the six-inch thick tome of a dictionary from my childhood, and found nothing. “Conflab” is not a word.

I was having a heated, one-sided, conversation with my computer about being an ethical and accurate source of information and not listing new-fangled nonsense the same way it does “real” and fact-checked information, when I saw the fine print. “Conflab” is “late 19th century: humorous alteration of confab.” Oh, really?

Humorous? Really? That’s funny as a German psychiatrist, ya jerks.

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Don’t mess with a woman who considers a leather-bound, six-inch dictionary, bought off a door-to-door salesman in the 1960s, to be a treasured inheritance at http://www.facebook.com/viewfromthenorth40.com .