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 b...