Published: 18 May 2021
Last updated: 4 March 2024
KELLY HARTOG talks to the siblings campaigning to get the word coined by their late father accepted into dictionaries and common usage
WHAT DO ELLEN DEGENERES, Sarah Silverman, Jake Tapper and Tiffany Haddish have in common? They’ve all contributed to helping Boston-based Jewish siblings Hilary and Jonathan Krieger honour their late father, by campaigning to have a word he coined get accepted into dictionaries.
The word? Orbisculate.
According to the late Neil Krieger, who passed away aged 78 in 2020 following complications from Covid-19, it’s what happens when the juice of a citrus fruit squirts in your eye.
Krieger invented the word in the 1950s as part of an assignment in his first year at Cornell University. Hilary, 44, says she grew up with the word and had no idea it wasn’t real until she was 23, when she lost a $5 bet with a college friend.
She recalls they were at her parents’ house and eating oranges when one squirted on her friend. “I said, ‘it orbisculated,’ and he said, ‘that’s not a word’.”
They looked it up in the family’s American Heritage dictionary “and to my great shock it wasn’t there. I first thought there was something wrong with the dictionary,” Hilary says. When she asked her father, he gave her a sheepish look and told her that “technically” it wasn’t a word.
Hilary, now an opinion editor at NBC News, told The Jewish Independent that to get a word into a dictionary it has to be used in common, everyday language. Together with her brother Jonathan, 35, they set out on a campaign to do just that.
The siblings spoke with several language experts and former dictionary editors, and learned that if people are using the word, it’s incumbent on the dictionary to have it. “But what’s important,” Hilary says “is that it has to be used in different places and communities — not just in ophthalmology journals, but in comic strips and songs and TV, so that it’s part of the culture.”
To make that happen, the Kriegers established a website: www.orbsiculate.com and created a list of 78 places where they would like to see the word used. They chose 78 because it was the age their father lived to. The list covers everything from having the word appear in a crossword puzzle, on a billboard, as a cocktail, in a song, and even appearing in a cheerleading squad formation.
Krieger invented the word in the 1950s while at university. Hilary had no idea it wasn’t real until she was 23, and lost a bet over it
The siblings threw themselves into the project, working hard to get the word into everyday usage. When their father passed away during the Covid pandemic, like so many others, they were unable to hold a proper funeral or shiva services.
“Not having those rituals, not having the community that we normally would have, was definitely part of why the word orbisculate and the story behind it came up as much as it did and gave us this idea that it could be a really wonderful memorial project for [my dad] and for us,” Hilary says.
She spent a lot of time on the phone or sending emails to friends “just trying to convey to people how special and awesome my dad was,” And she found herself mentioning orbisculate. “It was a short, easy way to convey a lot about his spirit, his humour, his creativity.”
As the word spread, the siblings were interviewed by news outlets around the globe, with the Australian Podcast Because Language naming orbisculate its 2020 Word of the Year. The popular online game Words with Friends added orbisculate to its dictionary last month.
Then The Ellen Show came calling. (link to clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAa8l8A26ME).
In April, DeGeneres unfurled a huge banner outside her studio in Los Angeles that read, “the only thing worse than missing Ellen is having a grapefruit orbisculate in your eye.”
She then revealed the celebrities she’d recruited to use the word. Black Jewish actress Tiffany Haddish told the siblings, “In my movie Girls Trip, someone did orbisculate grapefruit into someone’s eye.” Comedian Sarah Silverman said, “the problem with making yourself a drink that has some kind of twist of lemon …. The risk is the lemon could orbisculate into your eye.”
The Ellen Show also focuses on those in the community that give back. The orbisculate website sells T-shirts to help spread the word but all proceeds go to Carson’s Village, a charity the Kriegers partnered with that helps people navigate the logistics surrounding the loss of loved ones. The Ellen Show donated $US5000 to Carson’s Village.
“The response and support we've received has quite literally gone beyond everything I'd dreamed of,” Hilary says of her experience on The Ellen Show (which was done remotely due to Covid protocols).
“It's just incredible to have the chance to be on national TV, telling people about our dad and the word he came up with, and the wonderful charity we're working with. I know it sounds cheesy, or even insincere, but the best part of this kind of international exposure is the messages we receive from people around the world.
“They tell us how touched they are by what we're doing and share their own losses … Each of these messages makes us feel better about the world and the future and all the people we're now connected to. We are especially grateful for that.”
He’d be so touched because it’s all about how much we love him and want his spirit to live on.
Neil Krieger was a neuroscientist who had a huge love of words. “He loved Scrabble,” Hilary recalls. “Some of my earliest memories are of playing Scrabble with him; he had an amazing vocabulary. He was a renaissance man. There was a chair in the living room piled high with books on everything from art to music. He really loved the mystery and wonder of life.”
Raised Reform Jewish in Brooklyn, Neil Krieger embraced the Jewish Reconstructionist movement once he married and had his own family. “He believed in Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel’s idea of celebrating the moment,” and spent a lot of time reading other Jewish luminaries including Martin Buber and Aryeh Kaplan, Hilary says.
As the orbisculate project continues to gain traction, she says they are aiming high, hoping that “major league dictionaries” – including the American Heritage, Oxford English and Merriam-Webster – will add orbisculate to their lexicon, along with dictionary.com.
What would her father think of all this?
“I think he’d get a big kick out of it,” she says. “He’d love it and he’d be so touched because obviously it’s all about how much we love him and want his legacy and his spirit to live on, and for other people to get to know him. That would mean so much to him.”
To learn more about the orbisculate campaign, visit www.orbisculate.com
Photo: The orbisculate campaign motto, and photo of Neil Krieger
