Inventing Words

     The practice goes back, of course, to the earliest global emergence of languages, when cavepersons presumably felt the need to say things like, “pass me that rock,” or “let’s call this bright stuff fire,” or “anybody seen my favorite club?”

     Shakespeare, apparently not satisfied with the several thousand words available to him then, made up lots of new ones, among them: dauntless, lackluster, lonely, swagger, bandit, dwindle, uncomfortable, unreal, and unearthly. He used the un prefix liberally, tacking it onto over 300 words.

     Slang has long forced dictionarians (a real word) to officially add new ones: groovy, rad, shiner, bummer, switchblade, jeepers, ducktail, dork, spaz, nerd.  

     The tech world has recently gifted us hundreds more new words: Google, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, meme, blog, vlog, podcast, bingeable (as in a pop TV series), dumbphone (no frills).

     And how about all those anonymous souls who labor in the depths of the pharmaceutical dungeons inventing slick words for the thousands of drugs that overflow our medicine cabinets?

     There are a handful of words I would prefer to see erased from our language or at least severely usage-restricted by law: awesome, like, and committed top that list. And does anyone know what the devil woke means?

     Between 800 and 1,000 new words get added to the Oxford Dictionary every year. In 2022, these included influencer, ankle-biter, sharenting (parents sharing info about their children on social media), and trequartista (in soccer, a position between midfielders and strikers). In 2023, new words already include: nearlywed (nicer than shacked up), hellscape (Congress?), cakeage (a charge for bringing your own cake to a restaurant party), talmbout (conjunction of talking and about), selfcoup (or autocoup; what Putin did to secure power for life), and petfluencer (a person who gains social media followers by posting vids and photos of pets).

     We’ve advanced considerably from those cavepersons squatting around a fire and trying to come up with something clever to say. The Oxford Dictionary now gives us more than 170,000 English words with which to spellbind readers of fiction and poetry, obfuscate political debating, slant the news, confuse legal documents, sell a billion different items to hapless consumers, and delight Scrabblers.

Phil

P.S.  My six novels and short story collection represent about three quarters of a million words that I’ve tried my best over recent years to select and string together in a laborious attempt to engage and move readers. If you’d care to sample a hundred thousand or so for less than you’d pay for a fast-food meal, they’ll all available in print or Kindle on Amazon. You might even discover a few words I’ve made up myself.

  

Learning English

     Because I like the culture and the music and the people, I’m slowly learning Spanish through a daily Duolingo lesson. Many words are similar to those in English, which helps. Spanish does have a perplexing penchant for genderizing everything, though. Why, for example, is university feminine (la universidad) while skirt is masculine (el falda)?

     This has caused me to wonder how a foreigner must struggle to learn our oft-irrational and confuddling English.

     Many words, for example, are spelled the same but can be pronounced differently with different meanings, like:

     The nurse wound a bandage around the wound.

     A farm produces produce.

     No time like the present to present a present.

     A dove dove into a bush.

     Do you object to the object?

     An invalid’s insurance was invalid.

     If you want to lead, get the lead out.

     You need to wind in the sail in a high wind.

     The soldier decided to desert in the desert.

     The tear in her dress made her shed a tear.

     The bass angler plays a bass drum in a band.

     Unfortunately for the poor frazzled English student, there are many more examples of such craziness.

     Consider that there is no egg in eggplant, or pine in pineapple, or ham in hamburger. A guinea pig is neither from Guinea nor a pig. English muffins weren’t invented in England, nor were French fries in France. We ship by truck but send cargo by ship. Why do a fat chance and a slim chance mean the same darned thing? An alarm goes off by going on. Our noses run but our sneakered feet smell. When the stars come out in the dark, they’re visible, but when a bulb goes out in a dark room, it’s invisible. Why shouldn’t Buick rhyme with quick? Why is the plural of goose geese when the plural of moose is not meese? Sweetmeats are candies but sweetbreads are unsweet meat. Does a hammer ham?

     Few words in English work so hard as the modest little word up:

     We wake up in the morning, wash up, heat up coffee, get dressed up, lock up, go outside to find out if it’s clouding up or clearing up, and show up at work. We speak up at a meeting, finish up some project, look up several files, load up on carbs at lunch, write up a report, use up the day, work up an appetite, go home to warm up leftovers, call up a friend and maybe drink up a nightcap.

     Of course, you have to open up a drain if it gets stopped up.

     Lots of businesses open up in the morning and close up at night.

     People stir up trouble, think up excuses, line up for events, fix up the car, clean up the kitchen, straighten up the living room, get mixed up, get held up, and even sometimes just flat give up.

     Time for me to shut up.

Phil

Check out the latest suspense novel, Dawn Light, about a yacht delivery captain, which is up on Amazon in print or Kindle.