Paul Schleifer

According to the OED, neologism means “the use of, or the practice of using, new words; innovation in language.” Here are some synonyms: coinage, slang, a new word. According to www.etymonline.com, the word came into English in 1772 from French, néologisme, a combination of neo (Greek: the combining form of neos, “new”) and logos (Greek: “word”) plus –ism (a derivational suffix that creates nouns with a meaning of practice, system, or doctrine).

But we also use neologism to mean a newly made word, sometimes having to do with a specific sphere of human activity and often attributable to a specific person, publication, or organization.

Today is March 17, and you might assume that I’m going to talk about St. Patrick’s Day, but alas, no.

70 years ago today, Canadian-American writer William Gibson was born in Conway, South Carolina. His family moved around a lot when he was young because of his father’s work, but then his father died when Gibson was in elementary school. As a teen-ager, then, Gibson retreated into science fiction. He struggled, as boys who have lost their fathers sometimes do, and was finally sent by his mother to a boarding school. When he was 18, his mother died, and he dropped out of school before graduating.

He was involved in the counterculture movement of the 1960s until he left for Canada in order to avoid the draft. In Canada, he met his wife, had a child, and decided it was easier to attend college than work, so he earned a BA in English. It was during his coursework that he wrote his first science fiction story.

After college, he stopped writing for a while, worked at various jobs, and listened to a lot of punk. Then, at a conference, he met writer and musician John Shirley, who encouraged Gibson to try to sell his stories and start writing. Through Shirley he also met Bruce Stirling and Lewis Shiner, who recognized the unique quality of Gibson’s work, in particular the short story “Burning Chrome.”

And it is in “Burning Chrome” that we find the word cyberspace first used in literature of any kind.

Now, amazingly, it was not the first time the word cyberspace had been used. Danish artist Susanne Ussing and her partner architect Carsten Hoff called themselves Atelier Cyberspace when they created “sensory spaces,” but they were clearly not talking about virtual space since the internet did not exist in the 1960s, when Ussing and Hoff were doing their work.

In 2000, in a documentary, Gibson said that the word, even when he coined it in the early 1980s, was essentially meaningless. Despite that vagueness, the word has become a part of the lexicon.

Gibson went on to write some of the most significant science fiction novels of the 1980s, Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive, the so-called Sprawl trilogy. With Bruce Stirling, he wrote The Difference Engine, the best-known work in the steampunk genre. Then he followed that with the Bridge trilogy: Virtual Light, Idoru, and All Tomorrow’s Parties. And there has been a lot more since, not just fiction but also non-fiction and other kinds of art.

So happy birthday to William Ford Gibson, 70 years old today. He has not only been a successful writer and artist, but he has been responsible for a commonly used neologism.

 

The image is a picture of William Gibson taken August 8, 2007, by Frederic Poirot during the Spook Country promotional tour in San Francisco, California.