MAKING UP WORDS

I told my friend Sarah recently that I thought all words were 'borrowed'.

Well. Perhaps not all words. I think you can make up your own and start using them - the trouble is, unless you establish some sort of context, it'll be difficult to communicate exactly what you mean. So you may as well borrow words and change their context if you're going to try it.

Then I started thinking - what if I did start making up my own words and then deliberately slipped them into conversations? What could I get away with? And would I ever get to the point when I heard someone else using one back to me without them realising?

I'd definitely be one of the cool kids...

Could I manage to get a word, a real made-up clunker of a word ingrained into the vocabulary of people around me and then even further afield? What if I heard it on the radio?

I rubbed my hands together gleefully in the manner of a cartoon villain. This is a special kind of nefarious wizardry isn't it? Changing the English language without anybody even noticing? Could it be done?

About a minute later, I remembered in a flash that I also have the best friends in the world - and as polite and as charming as they are, I don't believe any of them would ever let me get away with this dastardly scheme.

Nope. Every one of them would eventually pull me up, ask me to define it, or look at me weirdly as though I've been assimilated by aliens. Either that, or they'd just ignore me altogether and attribute it to me being weird.

So maybe it's about persistence - making up a word and using it over and over again, always with a consistent context, and an easily-pronounceable collection of phonemes. Perhaps if it sounds like it's a real word, and you're on the edge of a dream that you've sort of heard it before, it will embed itself slowly into your mind and slip out eventually in an appropriate situation. You won't even think about looking it up afterwards!

Or alternatively like my excellent friends, you'll realise that I'm making it up as I go along and you'll distwindle yourself from my Machiavellian scheme.

I might give it a go. But I won't tell you when I'm doing it, obviously!

Mwoohaha.