Neologism SOS

[thebiggest]

This is a call out to all of my verbo-centric friends to help me graduate. I know that I have enough Scrabble-Boggle-crossword playing geeks, oops, I mean, friends to achieve some form of vocabulary critical mass, so I put this conundrum out to you. I've already caused the foreheads of the folks at Autumn Leaves to wrinkle with this one, so y'all

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Multiplicitous protestations of gratitude to the aggregate entirety of the writer's coterie!

[thebiggest]

Or, many thanks to all my friends! I really do appreciate the help, not the least because many of you seemed to find the issue as brow wrinkling as I do. So I don't feel quite as silly for being verbally confused. I think that Josh put the conundrum particularly well at the beginning of his second post.

While I absolutely realize that I'll have to discuss my choice of words within the body of the diss, I'm trying (perhaps unsuccessfully) to avoid two really obnoxious and pedantic academic tendencies. First one - resurrecting an obscure (often Greek) term and declaring that it means exactly what you want it to say. The second one - make up my own term and declare it my vital intellectual contribution to the field which no future scholar should be without. Trip's suggestion, the portmanteau (a lovely word in itself) is a far less egregious version of this sin and would enable me to bring two (or more) meanings into play at the same time. Still not sure which two words I would hitch-up, but it's something to percolate about.

Looking at the single-word suggestions that people came up with, I find myself agreeing with a lot of Josh's concerns against the use of certain terms. The problem with some terms like "shared" and "social" and "communal" is that they can apply to intimate and domestic spaces as well as more _______ spaces. I also want to avoid terminology that refers specifically to official government jurisdictions, like municipal or urban, because there are ______ spaces in the tiniest of communities.

For ethnographic reasons, I may have to avoid "civic" and "civil" as well, not because either term has to do with being polite, but because of the unique relationship between state and society that exists in China. In Europe and the Americas there are a lot of societies have legal (in the sense of being allowed as drawn from our "right to assemble", not in the sense of being groups of lawyers) organizations that span the gap between the state and the governed. The opposite is the case in China. Hypothetically at least, the CCP fills that role but in actual practice, the CCP and the state are essentially the same entity. Hence "civil society" a la Habermas doesn't really exist there. There are illegal societies, aka the Black Society (or the Chinese mafia) that often act through the medium of bribes and threats as labor or peasant organizations. There are, however, few legal entities that buffer the effect of the state - other than the family (perhaps a reason for the institution's comparative multigenerational stability within China). There was a period of time in the late 80s went it was fashionable among "western" academics of China to argue the existence of a Chinese civil society, but Tiananmen and the return to blatant crushing of contentious discussion, organizing and action in China put a stop to that very quickly.

But enough pedantic rambling. Basically I just wanted to say thanks for the food for thought and I am still considering the use of "common." Please keep me in mind if you come across a term that might help. Smiles!