Основы теории английского языка. Листунова Е.И. - 16 стр.

       VIII.
       Read the following passages and give further examples of neol-
ogisms which have appeared in the English language together with
new achievements of science and technology.
       1. Social, technical and economic conditions in Britain have changed
at a tremendous rate since the ending of the first world war and indeed
it is evident by now that science transforms man’s environment at a
pace which is not merely rapid but swiftly accelerating. Throughout all
the ages the elderly have lectured their juniors on the /happiness of the
old days and the decadence of present/ manners, but nowadays change
is so rapid that anyone out of the first flush of youth tends to feel
slightly out of date. The tramcar belongs to a former age and the steam
locomotive is already a living museum piece, while there are those who
speak of ri pping up the railway lines altogether and replacing them by
motorways. After the proud triumphs of the ear-phones and loud-
speaker even wireless has taken on an old-fashioned air alongside the
television set and is patronisingly alluded to as steam-radio — steam
being a symbol of antiquity, one supposes.
                           Brian Foster. The Changing English Language.
      2. One of the most important aspects of twentieth-century vocab-
ulary — the rapid extension of scientific vocabulary in recent times —
has already been dealt with, but a feature of this has been the spread of
what we may call semi-scientific words to general aspects of life,
usually abstract conceptions; this is particularly noticeable in a group
of words all of which end in -ize, and many of which have also a
secondary form, generally with change of meaning, beginning, with
de-; there are usually two forms at least, the verb in -ize and the
corresponding abstract noun in -ization. Forms of this kind are not all
very recent; Bentham, for example, used minimize, but there is a
great increase in such forms in the nineteenth century, and the
process continues today. The forms are often deceptive; actualize might
strike a reader as being very recent, but it was used by Coleridge a
hundred and fifty years ago. Among examples we may note scientific
words, which are to be expected, as carbonize, a term in the woollen
trade, and decarbonize, recognizable chiefly as a motoring term, deco-
lourize, dehydrogenize, dehypnotize, demagnetize, deoxidize, and depo-
larize; demonetize still belongs only to the world of economics; deodor-
ize and devitalize have spread from science to a more general applica-
tion; among more general terms we have decentralize, decivllize, dehu-

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