James, forgive me, but Marcus has made what I would call a reasonable albeit
negative response to what I've done as a neologist, so I can't help replying.
(James is the moderator of New-Poetry.  He's often after me and Marcus not to
bother others at New-Poetry with our squabbles.)

>> Here is what Geof Huth wrote (courtesy of Kaz Maslanka, my fellow
>> mathematical poet who joined the New-Poetry group):

>> In October 1989, Bob sent me a printout of his Lexicon Grummaniacal, 
>> which provides the pronunciation, derivation, and definition of words 
>> like vizlation, alphaconceptual, mnemoduct, xperioddica, and scuther. 
>> A few of these will be familiar to people familiar with otherstream 
>> literature, but the rest are, most likely, unknown. This list is now
>> terribly out of date, and Bob has abandoned some of the terms. But the 
>> mere existence of the terms is what interests me. Bob invents these strange
>> new words not out of fun, but out of a deep-seated need to achieve 
>> precision.  The words he knows, those that we use every day, are useful
>> enough, but they never quite achieve the accuracy that Bob craves. 

Geof, I'm sure, means that they never achieve the total accuracy that I'd 
love for them to achieve.  They DO achieve sufficient accuracy in most 
cases to satisfy me.

>> He makes these words to reinvent the way we talk about poetry, 
>> to reinvent the entire discourse of literary criticism.  But
>> let's look at the term here that is the least familiar to me:
>> scuther, which means "to disturb a person with too great a
>> complexity of input for him to handle". He goes on to explain that
>> "the resulting state . . . is often mistaken for boredom, but the
>> latter results from a person's being superior to what is causing the
>> state while the former results from his being inferior to it." I can
>> imagine someone inventing the word scuther, but I am surprised
>> by the emendation, the clarification. Who else would see the possible
>> confusion here? Who else could tell the scuthered from the bored? 
> 
> Yes, Grumman is forever inventing new words where there are perfectly 
> acceptable existing words. How hard is it, after all, to tell the 
> flummoxed from the bored, the confused from the bored, the 
> overwhelmed from the bored, and the like? Do we really need 
> scuthered? If we do, how much more useful a word it would be if it 
> distinguished the scuthered from the flummoxed or confused or 
> overwhelmed, or, even more usefully, the flummoxed from the confused 
> from the overwhelmed. Oddly enough, though, we can already tell the 
> flummoxed from the confused from the overwhelmed, and to tell them 
> from the bored is certainly neither difficult nor new. 

"Scuthered" does not mean "flummoxed," "confused" or "overwhelmed."  It
means, "bored by something which one is incompetent to grasp."  A scuthered
person does not feel confused or flummoxed or overwhelmed.  

> I admire Grumman for trying, especially for "aesthipient", which I 
> think has a good chance of becoming more widely used because it 
> sounds like solid academic jargon -- the kind of thing that anyone 
> familiar with the way language works can work out the nominal meaning 

Thanks, but the word is "aesthcipient," and I have since changed it
to "aestheriencer" because the latter is easier to pronounce, and connects to
such associated words as "aestherience."

> of and feel like something of an insider.  But that's all that that 
> word offers. Rather than to use the resources of the language 
> creatively to communicate, Grumman is trying to narrow down the 
> number of words appropriate to any given context. 

Okay, Marcus.  If "aestheriencer" or "aesthcipient," by whatever spelling, is
superfluous, there has to be a word that means what it does.  Tell us what
that word is, if you will.  It has to mean "experiencer of a work of art."  I
use my term because, to begin with, "reader" doesn't really work as a
description of someone experience a visual poem.  The closest term I've seen
used that means what I mean by "aestheriencer" is "auditor," but that strikes
me wrong connotatively since one often will experience an artwork without
judging it.

> On the face of it one might expect that it is a reasonable thing to 
> attempt, to try to sharpen meanings down into words that mean only 
> one thing. But that approach sucks all the juice out of language use -
> - it denies metaphor, analogy, and word-play. It is the crie de coeur 
> of the fundamentalist, demanding the literal reading, the literal 
> meaning, and only that reading and meaning, for each word. That 
> approach is not just unpoetic, it's anti-poetic. Instead of the 
> interestingly expansive use of an existing word, Grumman provides a 
> made-up word that means one and only one thing. Instead of the 
> metaphorical use of hearing in the word audience, 

And what do we call a member of an audience--in a single word?  And what about
a person solitarily taking in a painting becing called a member of an audience?

> with its echoes in critiquing (audit), Grumman wants us to use 
> "aesthipient", which, aside from its awkward pronunciation out loud that 
> makes the user sound as if they could not quite get their name-calling out 
> through their lisp, is pretty clever, but just not clever enough. Combining 
> "aesthetic" and "percipient" (or perhaps "recipient"),

The latter.

> it seems to offer something that, in the end, it just doesn't provide. We've
> lost the overtones of judgment implicit in "audit" within "audience". 

There are no overtones of judgement for the normal reader in "audience," and I
don't want there to be in my term.

> The aesthipient is passive; 

An aestheriencer or aesthcipient is not necessarily passive.  He is a partaker.

> the audience is active -- and active through the way language works  
> syntactically, grammatically, connotatively; it is not limited, as 
> Grumman would seem to have it, to mere denotation.

In analytical criticism, we should want "mere denotation," I believe.
Connotation should be saved for poetry, and--possibly--poetry appreciation.

> What this sort of thing has to do with Grumman is pleased to call his 
> taxonomy is instructive. Grumman's approach to taxonomy seems very 
> much like his approach to neologisms: he's inventing what's not 
> needed, and often go beyond "not needed" well into comically 
> superfluous. Accuracy in language is only part of the point -- 
> communication is the real deal. Language functions as it does, 
> allowing not only that there are many ways to say something but many 
> ways to understand what is said, to try to ensure, through that 
> structural systemic fact of the possibility of multiple messages, 
> that communication is likely (though of course not certain) to 
> happen. 
> 
> The way language works is messy, and what art does is try or organize 
> the messiness to get things across in a pleasing and memorable way. 
> What Grumman wants to do is eliminate the mess, or at least reduce it 
> to proportions manageable by denotation. What Grumman is doing with 
> both his neologisms and his taxonomy is trying to make denotation do 
> all the work. He doesn't want his categories fuzzy -- he wants them 
> crisp, clear, and demarcated by bright lines. Unfortunately for his 
> view, language users interpret attempts to tell them how to use the 
> language as noise, not signal, and work around those attempts -- 
> unless they're pretty spectacular. Grumman's neologisms suffer from 
> not being Lewis Carroll's -- and by no means all of Carroll's are in 
> common use. 
> 
> I hope Grumman keeps on neologizing, annoying as it is to have the 
> not-quite-right rasp across my aesthipience.
> 
> Marcus Bales

I will.

>Marcus, bless him, wrote (Barry Spacks chimed in):

>>I hope Grumman keeps on neologizing

>The Aunty Bob Himself, for about the 17th time, hopes to call
>attention to the pith-gist of the Bob-question
>to which this Bob-list is dedicated, viz: the value-laden
>nature of Bob's neologizms (misspelling intended).

So, how is "aestheriencer" value-laden, Barry?  And, a question I've asked
before but got no answers to--given a need to distinguish traditional poetry
from what I call "burst-norm poetry," what terms should we use?  (And why
can't you and others accept that I'm TRYING for terms that are neutral.)  I
use "live-norm" for conventional formal and free verse but don't like it
because it has no zip.  I'd truly be hugely grateful for something better that
goes with "burstnorm"--or for a set of terms that go together.  I don't
like "avant-garde" or "experimental" or "alternative" and the like because
burstnorm poetry is not necessarily any of these, it is just poetry that does
not adhere to the norms conventional poetry does.  This, I believe, will 
always be the case.  Prose will always have its norms, conventional poetry
will always conform, in the main, to prose norms, and burstnorm poetry will
not.

>I'll cheer Bob on (as Marcus does by legitimizing the man's self-salesmanship-
>via-vilification-of-others) once he stops pitching his own stuff while
>besmirching the competition with spinner's "names" and snide rejections.

>How about declaring the Bob-blurts-school, given its transparent effort
>to kill poetry along with its ever-hopeful readers, something like 
>"Incomprehensible Self-Seeking Mind-Numbing Schlock"? 

>Showing an honest, to-the-point humility of this sort would win over 
>even the Aunty-Bob by purifying the purposes of the Bob-List.

>In one word: if you must Tax, Bob, "level-the-playing-field"!

>Barry (of the "Every True Poem Is a Unique Invention and Oh So 
>Absolutely New" School)

So you don't think one poem can be more inventive than another?  Really,
Barry?  But burstnorm poetry is not necessarily inventive, it is just much
more likely to be, nowadays, than conventional poetry.

--Bob G.