For the Love of New Words

Deborah Jenkins wrote a More than Writers blog the other day entitled ‘Wordplay’, with wonderful alternative meanings for medications. It fed into my recent thinking about the origins of the words we use. Also, I noticed a friend had a new Twitter handle consisting of the first two letters of her three names, which made me remember something from my childhood.

When I was 10 we moved from a tiny, cosy terraced house to a scarcely-standing but massive crumbling Victorian house. I remember my sisters and I walking through the huge dusty rooms with chunks of plaster hanging off the walls, a terrible mouldy smell and rotten floorboards. My very pregnant mother described how lovely it would be when we all had our own bedrooms, gently telling us that for now everyone would sleep together in the study downstairs because the floorboards were unsafe everywhere else.

I’m telling you the tale because this slightly scary time of my life was when we invented a word that evolved a little but has been used for perhaps 40 years. No, much longer, I am using it today.

The wreck of a house boasted a garden of head-high (to me) weeds instead of a lawn, with trees dropping squashy fruit covered with wasps. Right at the bottom of the tangled greenery we three girls discovered a shed - the door almost fell off when we opened it but inside it was dry, exuding the smell of earth and flowerpots. Cobwebs provided natural net curtains for the dirty window. Immediately it became not just a shed, but a small, magical safe place. We claimed it as our own and came up with a name - ‘The Maanpa’. A bit strange, you might think - but it was perfect for the property of Margaret, Angela and Pat. 

We spent many hours decorating and furnishing it, then one of us wrote rules for its use (that was Margaret, who became a headteacher). Once we all jumped off the roof to see if our newly sewn parachute silk skirts would float us gently down (they didn’t). By the time our new little brother Jonathan could be wheeled down in his pushchair to look at our prize we had changed the name to Maanpajo. A few years later my parents adopted another boy, Martin. So the name gained two more letters.

This memory has alerted me to all sorts of invented names or words. Out has come a book of humorous verse to reread Lewis Carroll’s fantastical vocabulary, especially in his poem ‘Jabberwocky’. To save making a fool of myself here, I checked out the words he used in the first stanza and, to my delight, ‘mimsy’ is listed and credited to LC himself.

I love it when fantasy or dystopian novels create worlds using words with just enough about them to be clear instantly. Sometimes one or two new or surprising words can create a different atmosphere, as in Year:0033, the latest great book by J.M.Evans, where there are ‘Correctioners’ who have fierce control over the population of ‘Area IF208’.

Did you know that anyone can submit a new word to be considered for the Oxford English Dictionary? The word must not already be in the OED with the new usage, so a full electronic version needs to be checked. Often these can be accessed in a public library. The word to be added must have been published in a book, periodical and/or newspaper using the specific meaning. 

My additions to different uses for words are modest. I may never have a new word added to the OED but I am in the middle of writing a dystopian novel where I have included ‘Edlink’, ‘Enforce- Patrol’ and ‘Penwriting’. For an article in a Psychology journal, I used ‘Timeholes’ as one word to describe an upsetting reaction by a child to a normal incident, when the anger or fear displayed was totally relevant in a similar situation with a previous carer.  Although the concept has been recorded since in other ways, I’m not sure my phrase, ‘dropping through timeholes’ has continued.

But, is it possible you have created a word that could infiltrate the English language? If so, why not look up public.oed.com and become a submitoedite?

Annie Try is the author of the Dr Mike Lewis stories, in which a fictional psychologist and his clients encounter extraordinary mysteries.