Orð og tunga - 26.04.2018, Page 51

40 Orð og tunga
Compounds containing atóm- show a wide range of referents, some
of them quite distant from the basic meaning ‘atom’, but connected
metonymically to various aspects of the “atomic age”, to modern free
verse and, by extension, abstract visual art and modern art music, as
well as to the fi gure of the bohemian “atom poet”, inspired by Hall-
dór Laxness’ novel Atómstöðin [The Atom Station] (Halldór Laxness
1948, transl. Magnús Magnússon 1961).
The use of an international term rather than a native Icelandic word
or neologism marks the atóm- compounds as (potentially) diff erent and
metaphorical, enabling their metonymic use in a wide range of com-
pounds and collocations. By contrast, the accepted Icelandic neologism
for ‘atom’, frumeind ‘basic unit’, retains its transparency as a compound
and tends to decompose semantically to ‘basic unit’ when used in other
contexts, rather than carrying the same connotations as atóm.
As a loan word used in the post-war years, when the puristic tradi-
tion was largely uncontested but the language was widely perceived
as being under threat due to English infl uence from the new Ameri-
can military presence (Ari Páll Kristinsson 2012:348–349), atóm- also
iconizes the foreign infl uences that came with World War II. The col-
location “á þessari jassöld og atóms” (Rödd framliðins talaði af dikta-
fón í Ríkisútvarpið í fyrrakvöld 1957:12) [in this jazz and atom age]
uses two loan words to summarize the period in arts and sciences.
The article is structured as follows: In section 2, the Writt en Lan-
guage Archive (Ritmálssafn Orðabókar Háskólans, henceforth ROH) is
introduced and some of the diffi culties of working with such a lexi-
cographic archive are noted. Section 3 presents the concept of lexical
creativity (Ronneberger-Sibold 2000) and discusses its relationship to
productivity, as well as the potential for highly varied interpretations
of noun-noun compounds noted by Downing (1977). Section 4 con-
cerns the distribution and connotations of frumeind vs. atóm ‘atom’.
Section 5 introduces the atom poets and modernist literary move-
ments in mid-twentieth century Iceland. Section 6 focuses on the fi g-
ure of the atom poet in Halldór Laxness’ novel Atómstöðin. Section 7
presents examples of atóm- compounds used in connection with the
atom poets in their own words and in critical discourse, and section 8
discusses the image of the atom poet as a broader cultural trope as it
emerges from citations. In section 9, a comparison is made to a short-
lived later fashion for compounds in gúanó- ‘guano’, relating to types
of popular music that in some cases were contrasted expressly with
atom modernism. Conclusions are summarized in section 10.
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