Once Upon A Time

Today in a review of an Austin, Texas, restaurant called the Blue Star Cafeteria, the redoubtable Twisty Faster, in her indispensible blog "I Blame The Patriarchy", uses the word "harbinges", and then, in an asterisked aside, commands us to investigate:

No, it's really a word. Look it up.

So I did. And it's really not a word--not a word-word, but a demi-word, a ghost-word, which is to say it kind of is a word, but of a special, rarefied sort.

First things first, though. "Harbinger" means "that which foretells or presages", a sort of embodiment of an omen. It's from Middle English "herbengar", "someone sent ahead of a travelling party to arrange lodgings", descended from "herberge", "lodging", and therefore related to modern French "auberge", "inn".

Now. I have written before about the hapax legomenon, which is a word or usage that has appeared once and once only in a language, usually as the result of a misapprehension. On occasion, someone in need of a word which doesn't exist will deliberately invent one, often by modifying an existing word with an affix, but sometimes simply creating it out of whole cloth. Usually it will live and die with the originator: perhaps it will be used by a few, or be re-invented on another occasion by someone else, or perhaps (rare occasion!) it will enter the language. This variant of the hapax legomenon is called a nonce word, for which the Wikipedia page has a concise definition:

A nonce word is a word used only "for the nonce"--to meet a need that is not expected to recur.

It is, in other words, something deliberately constructed to be a hapax legomenon.

"Harbinge", the OED tells us, is a nonce word--and they ought to know, since the term was evidently invented by James Murray, the editor of the OED. There are two listed examples of the word's use, and it's easy to get the sense that OED mentions them grudgingly: they had to put the grim back-formation in there, because they had a couple of citations for it.

In the most technical possible sense, therefore, "harbinge" is a word; it's in the dictionary. (In a dictionary, anyway, though if you were going to be in only one, the OED would be the one to be in.) However, that dictionary also tells us that "harbinge" is a made-up word which only barely qualifies for inclusion.

So "harbinge" isn't really a word, exactly. Though it sort of is. I suppose. If you insist.