’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogroves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

                   Lewis Carroll

 Dear SunWinkers:

Neologism. We all do it but nobody wants to talk about it. You’re searching for a word, and you can’t find the one you want, so you make one up. I once had a co-worker who frequently said, “I was flustrated.” I don’t know if he was aware he had made up a word, but to my mind, it’s a brilliant example of a portmanteau word. A portmanteau squishes together two ordinary words to form a third; in the best examples, the new word combines both meanings from each word in a natural “that really ought to be a word” way. (A portmanteau is a suitcase. So you throw two words into a suitcase, give it to your typical baggage handler, and a new word comes out.) So “flustrated” would be a combination of “flustered” and “frustrated.” And it can be readily intuited that that’s exactly what it ought to mean.

I’ve read that “slithy” could be a portmanteau word combining “slimy” and “lithe.” “Absotively” (absolutely-positively) is another great example; I’ve heard it in common parlance and used it in my work, so I was delighted to hear it used in Steely Dan’s song “Two Against Nature.” Or maybe it was the other way around. (The neologism “grok” from Robert Heinlein’s Stranger In A Strange Land also shows up in the same song.)

In my poem “If God Is the Answer, What Was the Question?” I throw in a portmanteau of my own:

 Browsing religion books at Goodwill,
a once-burly blue-collar fellow sidles up
and pompulates: “Can you believe people
actually think we descended from apes? Apes!”

 These things can be ambiguous, but I’m pretty sure I meant “pompously postulates.” In another, recent poem I have the line, “Rats scutter across my path…” Sounds like it ought to be a portmanteau. A combination of “scurry” and “scatter,” perhaps. Or maybe I was just being onomatopoeic. I needed a fresher alternative to “scurry.” Whole books have been devoted to portmanteau words, but we will leave them for now.

Speaking of onomatopoeia, that is an excellent way, and excuse, to create a new word. Interesting to note, in English, “onomatopoeia” means “imitation of sounds,” but the Greek word from which we get ours means “creating names.” In Ulysses, James Joyce coined the onomatopoeic “tattarrattat,” referring to a knock on the door. In Edgar Allen Poe’s poem “The Bells” (an incredibly onomatopoeic poem—check it out!) he coins the word “tintinnabulation,” which has since come into the language. He presumably draws it from the Latin word tintinnabulum, meaning “bell.” Whether the Romans considered the original Latin word to be onomatopoeic is impossible to say, but Poe uses the coinage to marvelous onomatopoeic effect in this context.

In another dazzling segue (damn, I’m good), this leads us to yet another fine method of crafting neologisms: adapting a word from another language. In Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov coins the word “faunlet” to mean a boy “nymphet”; a faun (Lat. faunus) is the mythological fairy-creature male counterpart to a nymph.

 Nabokov also creates a neologism in “nymphet” by applying an alternate meaning to an existing word. Until Nabokov used it to mean “nubile pre-teen girl,” the word merely meant “small wood-fairy.” So there’s yet another means of neologizing.

Finally, sometimes you just need a unique word to represent a brand new idea. Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle contains many wonderful neologisms, including “granfaloon,” “wampeter,” and “karass.” There is a special term for this class of neologism: nonce word, which means a word invented to be used once (i.e. “for the nonce”) and then discarded. Another tour de force of neologism is the Beatles’ “I Am The Walrus.” It includes nonce words (crabalocker, textpert, see how they snied) and re-purposed words (semolina pilchard, eggman).

I wrote an entire piece of verse devoted to and full of neologisms which I called “Egostatic Fluffery.” If I’m as good as I think I am, it may be instructive.

So why are we doing this, besides the fact that it’s just plain good fun? Because I want you to think outside the box. I’m hoping this exercise will excite your imagination so that when you write a poem in the future, you will be more inclined to think about the sound of, and the richness of the meaning of, the words you choose. And make one up if you have to.

The Prompt

 Write a short- to medium-length poem incorporating at least one neologism. Try to use it because the poem needs it, if only to imitate a bird call, or perhaps to smush (smash, mush) together two ideas. We should feel we intuitively understand what the word means, either from the sound of it, or from the meaning of the words it’s made from, or from the context. Have fun!

Love,

Doug

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