Making words up (a serious game)

The idea is to take concepts, feelings, moments, for which there is no word yet, and trying to come up with something that might work. Proper use of grecolatin construction and english idiomatic construction is encouraged, but if there are no roots you can work with, you might as well come up with a new root entirely. It's allowed. Naming things is one of the most time-honoured traditions of humanity, after all, and isn't it one of the great pleasures of life?. Here are a couple of attempts, starting from some concepts outlined by Delirum of the Endless, who kept bugging her brother Dream over if there was a word for them. There wasn't, at the time of the story's writing, but let's not let that stop us.

• "the precise moment when you realize that you've actually forgotten how it felt to make love to somebody you really liked a long time ago". It's very hard making this a single word, but if we're working with "making love" and "fading away", perhaps one could say "noting the love unmade itself away"? Hm, too un weildly.
• "forgetting the name of someone when you want to introduce them to someone else at the same time you realize you've forgotten the name of the person you're introducing them to as well". I suggest "retroduction" over other alternatives like, say, "unduction", mostly because it suggests the backtracking you'll need to do when it happens. "Impresentation" might work too, and suggests you meet an impasse, a dead end: you're stuck.

Another exercise it to come up with definitions for words that already exist, but have none. Let's start with a classical example Lewis Carroll makes some shit up:

And then he went and actually defined the words...

Some of these words, such as "chortled", are now in the Oxford English Dictionary! While I don't presume that any of us here will be so lucky, I do think we could have great fun coming up with concept and with words and with the words that define the concepts and the concepts that the words suggest.

Ready, Steady, Go!

"I think you should move this to Writer's Block.

But, for what it's worth, "when you accidentally call your teacher "mom", or your boss "honey"": let's see... it's a lapsus, a stumble, a slip, a lapse... it involves excessive familiarity in more ways than one... it's accidental... it's embarassing... "kinslip"?

Here's another: "Aznable"= "something or someone you can azn", "to azn: to admire, hate, fear, and love -extremely capable and successful leaders of ambiguous morality are often the recipients of such mixed feelings".

A CHAR.

We already have a word for that: Char Clone.

Mimsy is quite a great word. I need an excuse to use it one day.

"hes"=gender neutral pronoun

"hoppiness"=Happiness through bunnies and rabbits.

Yes.

But then, he is Char Aznable. (Or something close to it, I haven't seen his full name spelled in years.) And apparently, so are you.

edited 16th Jun '12 12:44:40 PM by Night

Inventing words is like, my bag.

Fritzilion - a machine or system that uses a multitude of highly specialized and often counter-intuitive subsystems, with little regards for over-arching design or internal standardization. A computer that is powered by steam, performs operations via an optic neural net, and uses procedurally-generated jazz solos as a form of data output would be an example (and, incidentally, something I would pay good money to own). Name comes from the tendency of such poorly designed schemes to be nigh-impossible to debug and thus prone to fabulous break-downs (going "on the fritz").

I'm not aznable at all. Not yet, at any rate. But time will tell.

forestanding: someone who stands for something (and therefore won't just fall for anything). As they say, un homme honnête est un homme engagé: an honest man is a forestanding man.

outwhelming: something that doesn't over or underwhelm or even whelm you: it's so beyond your understanding, it just pushes you aside, excludes and alienates you. You can't process it nor do anything about it, so you end up not thinking about it at all. Example: the certainty of death and the prospect of Cessation of Existence.

"selenity": 1.that wistful feeling when your mind peacefully wanders among the stars. 2. One of the formal titles Princess Luna is addressed with.

"falling out of love": when you stop being "in love" with someone, especially through lack of effort. Doesn't mean you stop loving that someone.

"climbing out of love": when, through deliberate effort, you relinquish the sort of passion that "being in love" consitutes, especially if you have other priorities and principles that romance gets in the way of, or worse, threatens to or even begins to reshuffle for its own beinefit, before your very eyes!

"shift into love": the aforementioned process where you very own identity and values are warped and compromised by being in love with a person, who from then on becomes the center of your universe, the number one priority, and the source and measuring stick of everything worth having and experiencing. Once the charm inevitably breaks, prepare for a tough hangover.

"dumpover": the hangover crossed with Awesomeness Withdrawal from abruptly abandoning the emotional high of being in love, especially when one is the dumpee rather than the dumper.

"toctic": Describing sanity induced by a looming deadline.

We have attribution, contribution, retribution, distribution... ipsotribution, "giving oneself oneself's due"?