The fun of new words

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The fun of new words

Posted by Stan Carey on February 06, 2012


The attention paid to grammar and style can overshadow something equally significant about language: that it is so often and so naturally playful. In our love of puns and Scrabble, riddles and nonsense, rhyming slang and literary experimentation, we see the instinctive inclination to play with words and letters as though they were an abstract kind of toy for which playtime never ends.

Wordplay, in a word, is fun. It can break ice and break conventions, exercise the mind and stretch the imagination. Language, like physical play, is a medium through which we can indulge our creative instincts. Some people channel this into inventing entire languages; more commonly it manifests in our love of coining and using new words.

In an interesting post last week, Orin Hargraves wrote about fad words such as Tebowing and cyberchondria, describing them as “novel playthings” that we soon abandon “because we know that others will be coming along soon.” In a subsequent post about how words get into the dictionary, Michael Rundell described taking a familiar word and “doing something inventive with it to create a new meaning”, offering the amusing example “meerkatted to attention”.

Portmanteaus are an especially popular type of new word. Here, much of the groundwork has already been laid in the form of two or more existing words. There is a surreal kind of entertainment in seeing words joined improbably together, and when newspaper headlines join in the game, these blends spread all the faster. Any heavy snowfall nowadays is likely to be accompanied by references to snowmageddon, snowpocalypse, blizzaster and so on. There is novelty too in trendy gerunds, such as Tebowing and planking.

The last two links lead you to Macmillan’s online Open Dictionary, which offers readers the opportunity to submit new words and phrases; and to its BuzzWord archive, which looks in detail at some of the neologisms and topical terms that have leaked into more mainstream use. They show how the Internet enables us to share new coinages and verbal inventions faster and with a wider audience than has ever been possible before.

Inventing words and usages comes naturally to us, but getting one into a reputable dictionary is a rare feat. A more realistic ambition is to see a word we created attain modest currency beyond our personal use – or we can simply enjoy it for its own sake. Don’t be put off if someone says your neologism is “not a word”. Unless you’re using language in a formal capacity, it is yours to manipulate as you please. The great lexicographer James Murray wrote that “the circle of the English language has a well-defined centre but no discernible circumference”, and much of the fun is at the fringe.


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