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Auburn University
ABSTRACT
[gemde], a compound popular among football fans, is infiltrating the general lexicon. Despite [gemde]'s absence from standard dictionaries and lists of neologisms, more than a thousand respondents to an online survey available August 2002-July 2003 had views of its meaning, pronunciation, and how it should be written. The survey responses also document semantic extension of [gemde] to events unrelated to sports. To the survey results were added evidence from naturally occurring citations, such as can be found by searches on the World Wide Web. The evidence suggests combined [gemde] is a semantic unit. Because it was created relatively recently, [gemde] is further used to evaluate two recent proposals (Kjellmer 2000; Metcalf 2002) regarding characteristics that favor the adoption of a neologism, with both models predicting over a 70% probability of its adoption.
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