Think of a word...

As expected, a quiet day today, with relaxed routine filling it. Not much to say about that, so let’s talk about something else...

I’m always entertained by neologisms; they can be a symptom of some kinds of mental disorder, but our greatest literary geniuses have contributed their share to the language. Of course, after enough time has passed, no-one thinks of them as neologisms any more, especially those coined by Shakespeare, who made a habit of inventing words if the language couldn’t provide one.

It’s estimated that he coined around 1,700 new words, about 50% of which are still used with their original meaning, including frugal, horrid and obscene.

Lewis Carroll did pretty well, too. His poem Jabberwocky is solid with the things, though many of them didn’t make the transition, including pretty well the whole opening verse:

`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:

All mimsy were the borogoves,

And the mome raths outgrabe.

Of that lot, only mimsy has passed into the regular language, I guess. But later on we have chortled, whiffling, burbled and galumphing.

I'm particularly fond of retronym, which means a name for something already in existence necessitated by subsequent technical developments. So, for example, before we had electric guitars, all guitars were acoustic and we only needed to start calling them acoustic guitars after the electric ones were around. Similarly, manual gearboxes were only so called after we had automatic ones.

Today’s word from the World Wide Words website, though, was kelemenopy. Coined by one John Ciardi, he hoped that it would catch on, but sadly it never has, mainly because the concept it expresses is too esoteric, I suspect. It means “a sequential straight line through the middle of everything, leading nowhere” and derives from the middle six letters of the alphabet, k, l, m, n, o & p, which have ten letters before them and ten after.

Ciardi suggested that some political careers demonstrated kelemenopy. I’ve been trying to find an excuse to use it all day, but so far have failed entirely.

It certainly can’t be used to describe the endeavours of Mike and Bob of the Friends of Mercia, who have been constructing wild life habitats in the bluebell wood in addition to a useful bench, so I’ll end with a picture of them relaxing from their labours on said bench:

Well done, those men!