Do not be afraid to make up your own words. English teachers, dictionary
publishers and that uptight guy two cubicles over who always complains
about the microwave being dirty, they will all tell you that you can't.
They will bring out the dictionary
and show you that the word isn't there – therefore it doesn't exist.
Don't fall for this. The people who love dictionaries like to present
these massive tomes as an unquestionable authority, just slightly less
than holy. But they're not. A dictionary is just a book, a product, no
different from Fifty Shades of Grey
and only slightly better written. But you must be careful. Every new
word must be crafted. It has to have a purpose, a need. A new word
cannot be created with a fisted bash to a keyboard. Like every other
word in the language,
your new word should be a mashup of pre-existing words. You can steal
bits from Latin and German, like everybody else did. Or you can use
contemporary English in a new way. But you must capture something that
already exists, which for whatever reason has been linguistically
mismanaged.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment