Splitting the atom

Lexical creativity and the image of the Icelandic atom poets

Abstract

This study concerns innovative compounds containing the first component atóm- ‘atom’, based mainly on examples from the Written Language Archive of the Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies. Numerous compounds containing this loan word appeared in the years following the Second World War, especially connected to Halldór Laxness’ novel, The Atom Station (1948), and the modernist atom poets. Compounds containing this element have a broad range of literal referents. They became metonymic both for the modernist aesthetics and artistic forms of the atom poets and for the historical and cultural developments around the start of the Cold War when the movement emerged. The neologism frumeind, ‘atom,’ is not used in such transferred meanings in compounds, but tends to revert to its literal meaning, ‘basic unit,’ outside the context of physics and chemistry.