Embiggening The Enbiggen

It’s hard to criticise The Simpsons. Call me a simple-minded man in a thong if you insist, but the show is to our age what Michelangelo’s David was to the cause of all men with marble genitalia during the Italian renaissance. Yet however much I'm a fan, I have to draw a line at the word ‘embiggen’ (sometimes spelt 'enbiggen'). It isn’t the case that the joke has gone on too long. It’s that people seem to have missed the joke in the first place.

Three times this week I've heard the word used in everyday conversation. The first time, I was prodding courgettes in Tesco's vegetable section when I heard a shelf stacker explain to her friend how she planned to 'embiggen' her breasts with implants. I then heard the word used on the news last night and then I saw it again, today, written in a comment on a blog. Not that there’s anything wrong with English adopting new words. It’s one of the great qualities of our language. Only, ‘embiggen’ is the linguistic equivalent of a wart. It’s a joke word. It was first used by a man who had the verbal dexterity of a tongue tied anteater. It's only through good luck that I've not been handling a sharp object when I've heard it used. I could easily have damaged myself.

The man who first coined the word 'embiggen' was that phony hero, Jebediah Springfield. He uses it in his memorable aphorism, ‘travel enbiggens the smallest of men’. Only, the line itself is memorable precisely because it’s so ungainly. It’s as fraudulent as the founder of Springfield himself. A man could rupture his spleen trying to make a line like that sound good and it is ugly precisely because ‘embiggen’ is a lexical monstrosity. Why use 'embiggen' when we can choose ‘enhances’ or ‘improves’?

But this, of course, was the joke. The Simpsons also coined another word to describe this kind of word. That word is ‘cromulent’, a far better word in that it sounds suitably unpleasant and is ‘used in an ironical sense to mean legitimate, and therefore, in reality, spurious and not at all legitimate’. You won’t find either word in the Compact OED and with any luck, they'll be forgotten by all Tesco shelf stackers, Newsnight reporters, and bloggers. After all, we don't want to make embiggen bigger than it already is...