Published: 18 May 2021
Last updated: 4 March 2024
KELLY HARTOG talks to the siblings campaigning to get the word coined by their late father accepted into dictionaries and common usage
WHAT DO ELLEN DEGENERES, Sarah Silverman, Jake Tapper and Tiffany Haddish have in common? They’ve all contributed to helping Boston-based Jewish siblings Hilary and Jonathan Krieger honour their late father, by campaigning to have a word he coined get accepted into dictionaries.
The word? Orbisculate.
According to the late Neil Krieger, who passed away aged 78 in 2020 following complications from Covid-19, it’s what happens when the juice of a citrus fruit squirts in your eye.
Krieger invented the word in the 1950s as part of an assignment in his first year at Cornell University. Hilary, 44, says she grew up with the word and had no idea it wasn’t real until she was 23, when she lost a $5 bet with a college friend.
She recalls they were at her parents’ house and eating oranges when one squirted on her friend. “I said, ‘it orbisculated,’ and he said, ‘that’s not a word’.”
They looked it up in the family’s American Heritage dictionary “and to my great shock it wasn’t there. I first thought there was something wrong with the dictionary,” Hilary says. When she asked her father, he gave her a sheepish look and told her that “technically” it wasn’t a word.
Hilary, now an opinion editor at NBC News, told The Jewish Independent that to get a word into a dictionary it has to be used in common, everyday language. Together with her brother Jonathan, 35, they set out on a campaign to do just that.
The siblings spoke with several language experts and former dictionary editors, and learned that if people are using the word, it’s incumbent on the dictionary to have it. “But what’s important,” Hilary says “is that it has to be used in different places and communities — not just in ophthalmology journals, but in comic strips and songs and TV, so that it’s part of the culture.”
To make that happen, the Kriegers established a website: www.orbsiculate.com and created a list of 78 places where they would like to see the word used. They chose 78 because it was the age their father lived to. The list covers everything from having the word appear in a crossword puzzle, on a billboard, as a cocktail, in a song, and even appearing in a cheerleading squad formation.
