How To Invent New Words
excerpted from
The Comic Toolbox:
How To Be Funny Even If You're Not
by John Vorhaus
Who owns the language? Who controls it? Who makes rules for its behavior? This is an easy question to answer when you're in school: The textbook owns language and the teacher makes the rules. It's easy to answer on the street too. The people own the language, and consensus -- dude! -- is the rule.
But consensus... now consensus is a problem. If I decide on my own, for example, to change the word truck into the phrase sloppy joe, I can have an amusing little language party all on my own, talking about flatbed sloppy joes and quarter ton sloppy joes and year-end rebates on all new sloppy joes in stock. But if I'm walking down the street and I see a blind priest about to step into onrushing traffic, and I shout out "Watch out for that huge speeding sloppy joe!" my warning falls on a blind man's deaf ears because we don't have consensus. Thus is a righteous cleric needlessly snuffed.
Is it a safety issue, then? Are we conservative with language because we want to communicate with maximum efficiency, and we're afraid that if we grant ourselves language license, things will get too messy? Maybe. But within our microcultures, we already do it all the time. Investigate your memory for a moment and you'll see that it's true. What's that cute descriptive word for a member of the opposite sex that you and your friends all use? How did you say "drunk" when you were 17 so your parents wouldn't know? List some other words and phrases that you, inventive person that you are, have invented.
dumpkin; clownoid; sitcomsultant; cubehole; flophead; scrunky; singulural; smokequarium
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To name a thing is to own a thing. I once worked for a senescent TV producer who kept calling me Jack, Jack Vorhaus. After correcting him several times, I gave up and just let him call me Jack. He felt so proprietary about "his" Jack Vorhaus that he kept assigning me scripts. Did I feel shame in surrendering my name? Not really. Calling me Jack made him feel loyal to me, and it helped me achieve my goal of earning a paycheck through the work of writing.
To name a thing is to own a thing. When you make up new words, or move old words into new contexts, when your word choice is an act of creation and not just selection, you take ownership of the language. And language is a writer's clay.
Take some ownership now. Invent some new words. Don't be afraid to be whimsical.
Motoficial. Abneviate. Tartantastic. Skironic. Svoid. Dreadless. Depair. Indigot. Fleen.
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Here's me being not afraid to be whimsical: I now declare all words which begin with the letter m begin with mn instead. Where once we had the moon in May o'er a new mown meadow, we now have the mnoon in Mnay o'er a new mnown mneadow.
But what does it all mnean, Jack?
For one thing, it mneans that I'm suddenly mnuch mnore attentive to mny word choices. It mneans that as a writer I'm seeing language in a different light. It also mneans that I'm outside consensus, which is where an original writer mnust be.
- Invent new words to invigorate your language, increase your authenticity and boost confidence in your creative self.
Consensus. I gave a lecture in Australia and spoke of the need to "lay pipe" in a story, by which I meant "insert exposition." But the audience tittered. It turned out that "lay pipe" was Aussie slang for "screw." That's consensus for you. One man's structure tip is another man's smutty joke. I say fight consensus! and I hope you agree.
There are many ways to invent new words. For instance, you can boil verbs out of nouns. Just hunt for nouns which don't normally have verb forms and slap on an -ing. Slat into slatting or lamp into lamping or...
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Or try this. Add -age to any common verb. Weed into weedage; tank into tankage; drink into drinkage. Don't be afraid to be silly. Who said silly was wrong?
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I am a spy in the house of language. I take nothing for given. You have heard of these words: proton, neutron, electron? Your basic parts of the atom. Now how about these: photon, lepton, muon? They're subatomic particles, and if you have even a Discovery Channel knowledge of physics, they don't seem strange to your ear. Did you know there are further subatomic particles called sleptons, bosons, gluons, gravitons, gravitinos, and neutrinos?
And that's to say nothing of quarks.
You got your bottom quarks, top quarks, charmed quarks, flavored quarks, strange quarks and super quarks.
I'm not making this stuff up!
But I could, though, I could. I could invent slow quarks, fast quarks, sparky quarks, even happy, grumpy and dopey quarks. I could give you fluons and nuons and how-do-you-do-ons; pardons and hardons too.
I hear they've just decreed all known names for celestial objects obsolete. "Sun" gone, "moon" gone, "galaxy" gone. What can you give me instead?
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Hang on, though, hang on. Just because we change a name doesn't mean the name has changed. You might have changed galaxy to SimpsonBruckheimer, but consensus still knows galaxy as galaxy. You can't go around promiscuously renaming things if reality won't cooperate.
But reality is so subjective.
If you went to high school in the 1950s, your science teacher was a skinny guy with a skinny tie, horn rim glasses, and 15 minutes in a French cathouse in the waning days of World War II to show for his sexual experience. Intoning in a monotone, he informed you that each and every atom in the universe was comprised of some number of protons, electrons and neutrons. The building blocks of nature! He told you this, and told you it was fact!
If you went to high school in the 1970s, your science teacher was a hairy guy with a paisley tie, wire rim glasses, and five years of be-ins, love-ins, sit-ins and sleep-ins to show for his sexual experience. Speaking through a deep dope torpor, he alerted you that protons, electrons and neutrons were really made of quarks and leptons and gluons. The building blocks of the building blocks of nature! He told you this, and told you it was fact!
If you went to high school last week, your science teacher was a celibate with an Armani tie, contact lenses, and no sexual experience to speak of. Reciting subatomic poetry, she blithely declared that 90% of the universe is comprised of dark matter that scientists don't really understand at all. She told you this, and told you it was FACT!
What the fact, huh? Facts are subject to change. New information becomes available, old words are assigned to new concepts, and not only does language change, but reality changes too. And not only does reality change, but language changes too!
Today's electronic transaction is tomorrows e-commerce and there's nothing we can do about that. But when we writers alter reality -- on the subatomic level of the letter and the word -- we are in control. In other words, when you take command of language, they throw reality in for free.
It's easy to reshape reality. Just take existing words and assign them new meanings. Splurge means splurge, of course -- go wild, spend a lot -- only now (according to me) it means male orgasm too.
And where will these words come from? So many strategies to choose from. Experiment with the arbitrary. Open the phone book. Harvest the internet. Use the next three words you hear as one (what's a hearasone?) Or just wander in the green pastures of your mind.
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I now choose to redefine a number of words equal to the number of function keys on my keyboard.
F1. Crouch = the sound you make wadding up a piece of newsprint.
F2. Vying = mesh fasteners.
F3. Curvature = overwhelmingly tangible.
F4. Alloy = a secret fear.
F6. Ameliorate = to vanish or disappear, like Amelia Earhart.
F5. Despair = happiness.
F7. Tatter = a way to cook fish.
F8. Consciousness = ducks.
F9. Anthropomorphic = covered with fur and brightly colored.
F10. Condense = imprison.
F11. Component = media consultant.
F12. Sponge = female orgasm.
John, JV, Jack, what does it all mean? If all your choices are arbitrary, then there's no basis for choosing. Nonsense must logically result.
Nonsense must logically result.
Now there's something to think about.
To make your choices less arbitrary, seek a cognitive link between some words as they're currently commonly understood and the new way you intend to use them. That's what happened when surf went from the ocean to the internet, and when umbilical replaced leash at my local dog park.
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You can also use dead slang as a springboard to new words. Dweeb, nerd, wonk: Though only a few years old, these words already seem obsolete, and they'll make your writing sound stale. But you can easily invent new words that mean the same thing. Start by invoking the nerd. Call up a picture of him in your mind. See the pocket protector, the calculator and the heavy spectacles. Now give that picture a name. I call it "spec-head," capturing both the glasses and the quality of being trapped in parameters.
Alternatively, hunt for new letter combinations with similar sounds. Dweeb, wonk and dink make me think of weeb, twonk and gink. In this case, the very shape of your constructs -- their similarity to existing words -- conveys the meaning.
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Why invent new words? Beyond a writer's solemn responsibility as guardian of a dynamic, living language, it's just plain fun to build a collection. Try adding prefixes...
paracritical preordinary postliteral hpyopopositive dislogical cryptocertified dianaylsis unsmarten pseudosexual promanic antedata antipractical inapt unzero illinebriate microteen malanthropic foreswelling phenoscript megamyth dephase ectonothing
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...or subtracting them.
meditated murder thetical questions hensile toes scription drugs victed felons straneous material vailing winds tremist groups vective vidious veterate vigorate volve voke dignant pellant ception wilderment
-->Or add suffixes.
coffeeesque happyism vaultive lobotomania hemption thrillment guestable medievaling penisy slickize Illinoiser newcious jugfully requirate sparkage hosiary plushish pustulian repentology
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Or subtract them.
voluntar metamorph technic technol sapph dement occupat biolog pestic murd jit ging relig loit quintess tapest vasect fet sund
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Or just jam everything together.
hypocentric preism nonive endodigm tritation omnography reable conicrat teleful protivity philting egosophy paraphile enderotic disly comatory
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I could share all sorts of process analysis here, show you how I derived phenoscript from pheno as in -barbitol, as in sleep-inducing, as in snoreful screenplays I have read. Or how I grew penisy by cross-breeding -y with a list of sexual terms, and y not? The world can always use another word for dickhead. But in the end it's your process that matters, not mine, so watch your process as you go.
Meanwhile, back at inventing new words, you can also exploit typos. When jargon falls short, you get jargo, and an intended felony turns into velony when the right finger hits the wrong key. You can make mistakies on purpose, just to find found art.
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And you say you don't know how to be inventive. I scof. Which is like scoff, only slightly less so.
You can weld words to make new ones. This one's easy.
alternagraph pharmachute exersystem
falconstriction dynamitingale
Why am I doing your work for you? You have a dictionary. You have all the new words you need.
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When all else fails just make it up. Use any random or nonrandom collection of sounds that suits your fancy.
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I know earnest people who teach themselves five new words every day. They learn useful words like circumnavigate, spleen, snood, tetracycline and peristalsis. That's fine as far as it goes, and I applaud them for their ardent self-improvement. But wouldn't it be more wellroundifying to invoke the imagination as well? What about making up five new words a day? If nothing else, we learn to live outside the norm, which should make us feel more at in the world of fiction, which is not, by its nature, the norm.
Plus there's this: A character who can invent new words is a handy one to have around. That's one voice, at least, which you can trust to be cliché-free because it makes up everything as it goes along. And a character who has original command of language probably has original command of ideas as well. Also, using new words puts your voice into your work. That can't be a bad thing.
So take command of your language, just as you take command of your story and characters and theme. They're your words. You own them. All of them. The ones you create, designate or appropriate. Doesn't that make you feel rich now? Doesn't that make you feel like king of the world?
Or at least king of the word.