Strictly speaking | Connectography

This word owes its origin to one person’s creative thinking, in the title of Parag Khanna’s Connectography: Mapping the future of global civilization.  It was published less than a year ago (April 2016) along with a TED Talk, and with its controversial view – of a world where urban interconnections through long-range communications, transport and supply lines are more powerful than geographical and national borders – has already scored more than 75,000 citations on Google. Khanna’s emphasis on the megacity is echoed in recent indications of urbanisation in the evolution of plant species (BBC News: Science and Environment, 7 January 2017); and in linguistics, with evidence of metrolingualism – the mixing and sharing of languages among multilingual citizens in close-packed urban communities. The concept of connectography outlined by Khanna did not find favour in the New York Times Book Review (29 April 2016).  Nor would Fowler (of Fowler’s Modern English 1926 et seq.) have relished the word itself, with its juxtaposition of English and Greek elements. A similar objection could be made about television with its combination of Greek and Romance language elements. Yet modern English seems to tolerate language mixing: the meaning of an expression is far more salient than the origins of the words combined within it.  And with global communication networks to support newly coined words, they can become international English before they have established themselves locally.