Glibido : The obsession with neologisms, aka neologmania

It is high time to futurize (“modernize” is so 20th century!) the language, be more daring creationwise* (we really wise up more and more, moneywise*, nutritionwise*, even maturationwise*), and create a survivable,* made-for-2010 version* of English to ensure its contemporaneousness.* Twittering* and blogging*, IM-ing* and texting*, facebooking* (or Facebooking*?) and downloading* i-tunes* are just the first baby steps towards a dearly needed cyberfied (making compatible to the internet) language. English has become so marmorealized* (marmoreal = like marble + -ize = become like marble) that it really needs a thorough face-lift, a little bit botoxation* to volumize* its potential. As soon as those neologisms are properly dictionarized, the adultification* (state of becoming an adult) of textisms* (principles of texting) will rapidly progress and everybody conversercise (if we can jazzercise, why not conversercise?) in a more netesque (reminiscent of the internet) way, such as albumizing* fauxtographies* (photos corrected and cropped until they fit our expectations), and helping glocals* (people who live locally but surf globally) become locavores* (consumers of locally grown produce). What’s needed are more real language-forwards*, twitterati* and bloggerites who get the ball rolling and divine some new celloquialisms for the tubiverse* (the universe of YouTube). Let’s see how our cume* (cumulative audience) reacts to this brief language shockumentary* and its Doppler Effect (stupid ideas seeming smart when they approach, sounding simply stupid at the instant of passing by, and becoming more and more idiotic during their recession).

* = words seen in print

Although a study by Harold Baayen and Antoinette Renouf examining The New York Times for several years and chronicling some 80 million wordforms found that "most lexical innovations are nonce formations enjoying only ephemeral use," it is fun to go on reading about newspeak. My favorite: "Why language changes."

Many words are formed, using suffixes that indicate their meaning. It is, however, not recommendable to invent new words if another term with the same meaning is already well established (e.g. contemporaneousness instead of contemporaneity). And just because adjectives can be formed by adding a -y to a noun, there is no need to invent words like judge-y people (we have "judgmental") or jungle-y green (Roget's Thesaurus already offers more than fifty different adjectives to decribe the color green) just to be genius-y.


Noun Suffixes

-acy (= state or quality: private → privacy)
-al (= act or process of: to refuse → refusal)
-ance, -ence (= state or quality of: to maintain → maintenance; eminent → eminence)
-dom (= place or state of being: free → freedom)
-er, -or (= one who: to protect → protector; to train → trainer)
-ism (= doctrine: social → socialism)
-ist (= one who: pharmacy → pharmacist)
-ity, -ty (= quality of: real → reality)
-ment (= condition of: to argue → argument)
-ness (= state of being: conscious → consciousness)
-ship (= position held: fellow → fellowship)
-sion, -tion (= state of being: translate → translation)

Verb Suffixes

-ate (= to become: grade → graduate)
-en (= to become: height → heighten)
-ify, -fy (= to make or become: terror → terrify)
-ize, -ise (= to become: civil → civilize)

Adjective Suffixes

-able, -ible (= capable of being: eat → edible)
-al (= pertaining to: region → regional)
-esque (= reminiscent of: picture → picturesque)
-ful (= notable for: beauty → beautiful)
-ic, -ical (= pertaining to: myth → mythic)
-ious, -ous (= characterized by: nutrition → nutritious)
-ish (= having the quality of: fiend → fiendish)
-ive (= having the nature of: create → creative)
-less (= without: end → endless)
-y (= characterized by: sleaze → sleazy)


Interested in invented languages?