Fun with Words

When I was young I wondered where new words came from. Was there, I wondered, some bench of judges with furrowed brows who pored over immense tomes and eithe ratified new words or coined them personally?

Apropos of nothing, I still wonder about the process now that I am approaching (some would say have already entered) middle age. Apparently there is a Latinist in the Vatican who comes up with Latin versions of new words, and the French regularly make the news by their protestations at the invasion of some Americanism or other into their pristrine Gallic tongue. And one must acknowledge the mainstreaming of, say, a slang term once it appears in the current edition of the Oxford English Dictionary or even Webster's. But who creates - say, in the English-speaking world - new words?

My wife's family has a word I'd never heard anywhere else: "gription". Its meaning may not strike you at first if you read it, but try saying it aloud. "Gription". A combination of "grip" and "traction". While it has many applications in the parlance of the Archlaical in-laws I've always thought it would be the perfect word to use in a ad for high-performance tires - or even snow tires. "Buy Badrich Vulcanas - 50% more gription than Michelin".

Sometimes propective words come from strange sources. Boston's mayor, the aptly-nicknamed "Mumbles" Menino, is a constant source of mispronunciations, malapropisms, and mangled syntax. And yet even a blind squirrel finds an occasional acorn. A couple of years ago, at a press conference discussing allegations that two public safety employees had been under the influence of various substances while on duty, Mistah Mayah promised an overhaul of the department in question - including "Randatory testing". Perfect! Now that the concept of random drug testing has become mandatory in certain fields, why should we waste two words when one will do? Everyone laughed when he said it, but I'm expecting it to work its way into the vernacular sooner or later.

I invented a word of my own a couple of years ago, during one or another of the public embarrassments visited upon a wealthy and oversexed wastrel whose name I originally confused with that of a hotel in the principal city of France* and who is mainly famous (or notorious) for being famous (or notorious). After several days of news stories about her latest travails, a word popped into my head: "megaslut".  It succinctly described the magnitude of her notoriety and the depravity of her lifestyle. It's taking a while to catch on, perhaps because I have so little occasion to use it in polite company, but I expect it to someday be a fixture in the gossip columns!

*One day several years ago a co-worker asked at lunch whether anyone had seen the "Paris Hilton Video" Never having heard of the individual in question I wondered what sort of video about a hotel would have such interest and currency amongst certain of my perpetual adolescent co-workers. I finally decided that it must be footage of some sort of controlled demolition. Imagine my surprise when I dicovered what it really was!