a new word for something new, undertaken with the right intention but which has not (yet) led to the desired result.
You only recognize a nearling when you look back, and you can always learn from a nearling.
You can be proud of nearlings because:
- You started an initiative
- You may have moved others
- Maybe it led you to something that was successful
- You need many nearlings, for a few successes
- You learned from it
- …
(Excerpts taken from Creativity Today)
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Looking at the big picture, doesn’t social media look like a cluster of nearling after nearling, leading to another set of nearling after nearling?
What do you think?
Is this why big businesses haven’t had as much success as they have in the past with traditional media? To much iteration?
Bravo, Chris! Words to grow by!
It is only “failure” if we fail to LEARN from the outcomes!
Dr. Burt
Your use of the term “bum rush” on march 29 is a nearling. The traditional meaning for the phrase “bum’s rush” means getting rid of someone you don’t want in your space such as catching you on the street, they call you on the phone, drop by the house unannounced…in general you want them gone asap!…like an unwelcome visitor you do not even offer a drink and whom you tell you were just on the way out th door…just so they will go away. Someone is “given the bum’s rush” or say they “got the bums rush”. However, as language tends to be more plastic than people think. So now I have a word for it. A nearling. Last week, I explained to my 79 year-old father the new meaning of phrase “off the hook”. But what do you call it went a form of a word is developed? For example, the word “converse”, to talk with someone, has be replaced in some under 30’s with ‘conversate’. They don’t even know the word is not correct. Can you give me some background on this phenomenon?
Ann-Louise,
The term “bum rush” apparently has quite a few different meanings.
You are right the term “bum rush” was a nearling, in that it just wasn’t quite right for our effort, but I went ahead with the term since it had been used in 3 previous efforts.
That’s the thing about language. It’s not a static set of rules. It’s an art that’s always evolving.
Nearling. What a nebulous and useless word. Might as well create a new english word for every color in the success-failure spectrum. Let us hope that, if god forbid it does become a part of the language, ‘Nearling’ becomes a euphemism for failure and winds up on the island of discarded words.