Conjuring New Words
The Cambridge Dictionary was recently updated to include a whole raft of new words. ‘Pebbling’, ‘anti-fan’, ‘trendbait’ – new words are being invented all the time. Our lexicon (both at the global level and at the individual level) is constantly evolving whether we’re aware of it or not. Every time a new thing is invented, every time a new concept comes to prominence, every time we go through a major event, we tend to invent new words.
Nowadays, most of these new words come from the realms of science, technology and sociology, as well as being driven in interesting directions by the always-creative youth. But in the past, it was more often writers who were responsible for enriching our language in this way. Shakespeare is credited with such delights as ‘bloodsucking’, ‘moonbeam’ and ‘bedazzle’ as well as the more obviously-Shakespearean ‘lily-livered boy’. Charles Dickens is the first known user of ‘butterfingers’, ‘cheesiness’ and ‘boredom.’ Lewis Caroll pushed past the existing lexicon to create things like ‘chortle’ and ‘galumph.’ John Milton came up with ‘pandemonium’; Karel Čapek invented ‘robots’; Mark Twain gives us ‘hard-boiled’; without Walter Scott, I wouldn’t be a ‘freelancer’; and imagine how much poorer the world would be if Alexandre Dumas hadn’t coined a word for ‘feminism.’
But recently, it feels as though writers have ceded the power of word creation to those in other professions. So, my craft article this month is a rallying cry for us to be neologists once more. Creating new words is a risk and taking risks can be scary. But what harm is there in simply playing around with letters and sounds and seeing what results?
Earlier this year, I had a story published by the wonderful people at Gone Lawn that includes over fifty ‘made up’ words. ‘Shoudy’, ‘gloomering’, ‘jickerjacks’, ‘snide’, ‘globberjaw’ can all be found in the first paragraph alone and whatever you think of the overall effect, hopefully the piece can’t be accused of playing it safe at the level of language. I’m sure there are plenty of readers out there who don’t get on with this story. It pushes word invention to an extreme and the more we push things to an extreme, the more readers we tend to alienate. But while a dense packing-together of neologisms might not be for everyone or every piece, I think that all writers should be able to invent the occasional new word where it serves the purposes of their story.
How to invent new words
Of course, saying to someone ‘Invent me a new word for X’ is probably the most sure-fire way of ensuring that they can’t come up with anything at all. Plucking a new word from the air is very hard, which is another reason for not trying to come up with over fifty for an individual piece of flash fiction! But if you do want to have a go (I hope you will!), there are plenty of avenues you might explore:
Kenning. In “Green to the nubbing-cheat”, one of my made-up words is ‘twine-snake’; another is ‘word-truth’; I also have ‘boot-hulls’ in the second half of the piece. These are examples of kenning, two nouns joined together to create an image that provides a creative description of a thing or concept (‘twine-snake’=’handcuffs’; ‘word-truth’=verdict, ‘boot-hulls’=soles). This is something we see in words like ‘bookworm’, ‘bean counter’ or ‘cancer stick’ and has been used by writers like Seamus Heaney and John Steinbeck. It works on the level of metaphor and feels like something a lot of writers could use to wonderful effect. Prompt – write a story from the perspective of (a) a caveman, or (b) an animal which takes place in a modern office, theme park or shopping centre – how would they describe computers, wheelie chairs, mobile phones, rollercoasters, cars, shopping trolleys, carpets, stairs, windows etc.?
Noun-adjective pairings. Shakespeare was particularly big on noun-adjective pairings. Many of the words credited to him fall into this category. ‘Blood-sucking’, ‘green-eyed’, ‘time-honoured’, ‘paper-faced’, ‘lily-livered’ – these are all found in Shakespeare before they are found anywhere else. Following in Shakespeare’s wake, noun-adjective pairings have continued to sprout up all over the place in everything from novels to plays; and this perhaps is an easier first step into word creation for the neology-reticent among you. Prompt – write a piece where the narrator is angry at someone and build up their anger through increasingly inventive noun-adjective pairings, thinking about interesting ways to describe that person’s appearance or personality.
Portmanteau words. When “Green to the nubbing-cheat” was first published, a lot of people kindly compared it to Lewis Carroll and this is probably because of the use of portmanteau words. ‘Shoudy’, for example, is a portmanteau of ‘shout’ and ‘goudy’; ‘gloomering’ is a portmanteau of ‘gloomy’ and ‘glimmering’ – and there are plenty of other portmanteau words later in the story. A portmanteau is simply two existing words squished together to create a new word, and is another fun way to play about with language. Prompt – write a story that takes place in a dreamscape and uses portmanteau words to add to the surreal nature of the piece.
Scavenging. Plenty of the words that might seem made-up in “Green to the nubbing-cheat” aren’t actually made-up at all. They’re words that I’ve borrowed from the past, sometimes using them as they would have been used back then and sometimes adapting them for the purpose of my story. ‘Nubbing-cheat’ is an old word for ‘gallows’, ‘daddle’ is a Victorian word for ‘hand’, ‘gullyfluff’ is equally Victorian. There is a wonderful dictionary of Victorian slang freely available here, and a Google search for ‘X+slang’ or ‘X+dialect’ will generally bring up plenty of words you might borrow in order to give a certain tone to your story. Prompt – choose a particular time period and do a Google search for a list of common slang. Does this give you an idea for a setting or scenario? Alternatively, choose a particular group like pirates or taxi drivers and see where their words might take you in terms of story.
Making things fit
In the prompts I’ve suggested above, I’ve deliberately tried to provide scenarios that would lend themselves to word creation. This is because word creation isn’t always appropriate. As much as I love words, I always think that words should be in service to story and character, and sometimes creating new words doesn’t quite fit with the world we are describing or the particular narrative voice.
What is that voice? When we’re creating new words, we generally want them to fit cohesively into the way our narrator talks. An older narrator is more likely to use old-fashioned words; a child narrator is more likely to use creative inventions; a more educated narrator is more likely to use highbrow language; a dreamer or an artist is likely to be less constrained by grammatical correctness. When we’re inventing new words, we need to be mindful of that. This is where scavenging can come in useful. We all belong to certain groups in terms of age, education, location, profession, and hobbies and the words that belong to these groups tend to infuse our language. Any new words we invent should try to sit cohesively alongside that existing corpus of words.
What is my character’s field of reference? On my Glorious Words course, I get writers to create a character-specific spider diagram that includes job, birthplace, hobbies, favourite ice cream flavour, and favourite animal. The reason for this is that how we describe the world is affected by what we know and what we love. This is something to think about with any sort of word creation – how does the new word reflect (and enhance) the sense of character? If we turn our hands to adjective-noun pairs for example, a vegetable-averse narrator might use ‘pickle-muncher’ as an insult whereas someone else would see this as a badge of honour. In creating a kenning for ‘stairs’, a child might describe them as a ‘zig-zag hill’ whereas a visitor from a technology-overloaded society might call them a ‘stationary escalator.’
Why create a new word when another one already exists? Word invention can create a highlight in our writing, something that draws a reader’s attention. They can often exaggerate or add tonal / emotional nuance. A neologism can be used as a euphemism – think about how we describe death (‘they’ve snuffed it’ or ‘they’ve gone to live on the great farm in the sky’) or how we describe sex (there are some wonderful Victorian expressions for this like ‘they are in convivial society’ and ‘they are playing blanket hornpipe’) – and euphemisms (along with metaphor and other imagery) ask a reader to engage more firmly with a story. As mentioned above, neologisms can be expressive of character and what groups a character belongs to. They can also help with world-building, especially when we are pushing into the historical or the speculative.
Does the word make sense in context? When I was writing “Green to the nubbing-cheat”, I kept asking myself if anyone would actually understand it. I’m sure there are certain sentences that make more sense than others, but hopefully the overall essence of story, character and emotion comes through, at least in part. As with anything in writing, this can be a tricky balancing act. We want to play around with the possibility of word creation, but we also don’t want to lose our readers entirely. So, think about making it clear whether a made-up word is an adjective, noun or verb (or something else); think about how easily a reader might guess what a word means, either through the way it looks / sounds or through the context of the sentence.
Taking things further
To read more about neologism and how “Words do things with words”, here’s an interesting article from the White Review.
One thing I love about flash fiction is the possibility to push language in a new direction and one writer who, for me, is doing that in a brilliant way is Francine Witte. Check out her story “This Won’t Take Long, Will It?” (Francine Witte | Fictive Dream) for another example of how word creation can enhance a story.
Want to play about with word creation and other wordy techniques in a safe-space environment? Why not join my Glorious Words course? During the course, we look at inventive verbs, the power of collective nouns and creating character-specific images among other things.
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An excellent and moving story, Matt. I loved the inventiveness of your language- I wondered if you made up the words as you went along or wrote the piece more conventionally first?
Hi Matt - really wondacious article. However, you suggest that snide is a new word. While I hope that you don't think I'm being insulting in an indirect way, I just wanted to let you know it's an old word. That said, I found your writing glorifun.