Fun with words

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I remember going shopping for a fishing rod with two friends, when I was in my early teens. My buddy Dino picked a rod up, shook it in his wrist and said, “I like this one, it has good grippage. We instantly knew what he meant. It was years later, when I used this word at university that another friend said, ‘That’s not a word.’ We argued about this, and I was so convinced, I recall that there was a wager made. I lost the bet, but it wasn’t until days later when we found a big enough dictionary that I was satisfied that I had lost. (We can sometime forget that Google wasn’t always there to help us.)

Last night, after responding to a comment by Aaron Davis on my blog post We need a new word: Memidemic, (where I was having fun creating a new word), I was on Twitter and came across this post:

Which shared the following 4 words:

I retweeted this with the comment:

Dr. Kay Oddone quickly responded:

To which I responded:

While I think that internest is rather punny, I don’t think of it as having much utility. However, I love when new words make it easy to say something precise and poignant, needing little explanation. My attempt with memidemic is to express something spreading virally, without the negative connotation of a virus or an epidemic… good things can be spread too, why can’t we have a word that expresses that?

Textrovert, cellfish, and nonversation are brilliant! They need little explanation, and they say in a single word what would normally take at least a sentence. I could use all of these tomorrow and, with a little context, people whom have never heard the words before would understand what I was trying to get across. I think in their own way, these words have grippage, and they are probably going to stick around for a while… I’m pretty sure I’ll be using them!

 

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