I've just found a bunch of research on my computer about conflab. I can't remember why I saved a bunch of corpus results on it, but maybe it was season/series 5 of Succession that brought it to my attention, when an Australian actress playing an Anglo-American rich person said it in dialog(ue) written by a rather British writing team:
I knew the word confab, a shortening of confabulation, and I'm pretty sure I'd heard conflab before and dismissed it as a speech error. This time, I did the responsible thing and looked it up. It's not a speech error.
Confabulation came into English in the 15th century from Latin, meaning 'a conversation'. (In the 20th century, it acquired a psychiatric meaning: 'a hallucination of a memory'. That newer meaning is irrelevant to the abbreviated forms I'm discussing here.) A confab is a conversation, an argument, or (in a later development) a conference or the like. It's an informal word, as clippings often are, and sounds a bit jokey—but it's surprisingly old. (Surprising to me, at least.) The first OED citation is a British one from 1701. The second is from Thomas Jefferson in 1763, so it was not unknown in America back then. Green's Dictionary of Slang has a few more British examples from the 18th century:
Green marks it as American as well. His 1843 example is from a book published in Philadelphia. BUT before the 1873 Kansas citation, he has who British ones:
So is conflab an Americanism? Well, whatever its origin, it is more British now.
- Hypothesis 1: Conflab has always been more British than American.
- Hypothesis 2: Conflab started in the US, and subsequently withered there, but not before it had been taken up in the UK.
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Comments, please!
ReplyDeleteThere is (or was) a television program called "Glow Up: Britain's Next Make-Up Star' where the two judges would regularly "conflab" to choose a winner and loser. I had never heard the word before.
DeleteIt's "Glow Up" that gets at me! Val: "Conflab?" Dom:"Yes, Conflab." That was the show where I strangely shouted at the screen. I know now that the hosts are not mentally challenged, but... Still. Ugh.
DeleteI (BrE, elderly) have never heard "conflab"! Possibly it's a generational thing, but if I were to use the word - and although it is part of my vocabulary, it is not an active part - I'd say "confab".
ReplyDeleteMe too.
DeleteThirty years ago, the British National SF convention was call Confabulation. I thought the committee must have made the name up, nor did I know the shorter form.
The only place I (AmE) have seen “conflab” is in Substack posts by E. Jean Carroll, the former Elle advice columnist who successfully sued Donald J. Trump for sexual assault. I assumed she'd coined the word.
ReplyDeleteWhat do people who use "conflab" think that "flab" is about? Sounds like a Weight Watchers meeting to me.
ReplyDeleteLynne... Thank you so much for writing this post. I've been hearing 'Conflab' and physically cringing from the word SO many times since moving to the UK. I even remember yelling at the telly due to someone saying 'Let's have a conflab...' and I angrily said to my partner: It's confab... Short for confabulation.... What the h-e-double hockey sticks is a conFLAB? GAH!
ReplyDeleteNow I know. And I still think it sounds horrible when spoken. I'll die on that hill.
Is there a technical term for it? For putting an extra consonant into a word? I thought it happens sometimes in speech for pronunciation reasons (we all say ham-p-ster for the little bug-eyed rodent) but any ideas why the "fab" here would have become "flab"? Simply mis-heard and then misspelt?
ReplyDeleteI beg your pardon - we don't 'all' say 'hampster', though the word is sometimes mis-spelled thus. Like Mrs Redboots, I'm familiar with 'confab', though I rarely use it myself, and would regard 'conflab' as an error.
DeleteThe technical term is "epenthesis". Indeed, Wikipedia's page on epenthesis uses "hampster" as an example!
Deletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epenthesis
However, I don't think epenthesis can explain "conflab", since there's nothing difficult about pronouncing "confab". I wonder if it could be a mixture of "confab" with "flap", as in flapping your mouth?
That OED entry is unrevised from 1972. Maybe "conflab" hadn't taken off yet in BrE at that time? Or maybe Burchfield just missed it in British sources? They'll need to take a look at the regional label when they do the revision. (I'm American and never heard of "conflab" before.)
As a Brit, I have to say I’ve only never heard “conflab” - or if I’ve heard “confab”, my ears have “auto-corrected” it to the word I’m familiar with. That said, I would rarely, if ever, use the word myself.
ReplyDeleteThe word confabulation is somewhat similar to the word “conflagration”, often used in the media to refer to a fire. I wonder if the extra L cropped in due to confusion between the two words? Would conflagration have been a common word at the time “comflab” seemed to originate?
The ‘Glow Up’ example given above is what sprang immediately to my mind because I watch this show regularly and was very surprised to hear ‘conflab’ - not because I consider it an error but just because the word felt positively archaic to me in general.
ReplyDeleteI’m 56 (British) and can’t recall having heard that word used anywhere else since I was a child, although I genuinely couldn’t tell you whether it was ‘fab’ or ‘flab’ that I heard back then. If I had to guess, I’d err on the side of ‘fab’ but it’s a word that I’d associate with my mother (born 1936) and her contemporaries. After a gap of 40+ years, my ears were probably able to deceive me enough to conclude that it was actually ‘conflab’ that I’d been hearing/saying all along, so that the Glow Up presenters’ usage didn’t seem strange to me - other than that they were using outdated slang as a jokey gimmick.
As to why an L crept in in the first place - most people today wouldn’t know that it was ever short for ‘confabulation’ (I didn’t, and I’ve got a linguistics degree), and the only other examples I can think of where ‘-fab’ occurs as an ending are ‘pre-fab’ (short for ‘pre-fabricated’ with reference to a certain type of building, and largely out of use now) and the word ‘fab’ itself which is universally known to be short for ‘fabulous’ and so probably stands apart. We do however have a number of words with a ‘nfl’ consonant cluster in the middle (inflame, inflict, un-flag) including several that begin with ‘con’ (conflict, conflagration) so - to me anyway - ‘conflab’ just feels more natural than ‘confab’.
It’s worth noting that my phone’s autocorrect changed ‘confab’ to ‘conflab’ every single time!
I'm familiar with 'conflab' in BrE, though it's not common, and don't recall hearing 'confab'. I had no idea it had origins in 'confabulation' and for that matter I didn't know that a 'confabulation' was a conflab - I'd have assumed it was something to do with fiction (like 'fabulation' or 'fabulism' - fitting with the SF convention mentioned above, which I had heard of).
ReplyDeleteI always assumed conflab was a reference to merging the conversation and hallucination meanings in a self-deprecting way. A jokey/mocking reference to a formal discussion - where the subject is not deserving of a serious 'confabulation'. Where wild takes and outlandish ideas would not be out of place.
ReplyDeleteIn my mind it has connotations of lips FLApping and nothing useful coming out!