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.