#9. Creating New Words

When I was in the third or fourth grade, I read a book called "Frindle," which I remember to this day because I really enjoyed it. The story is about a boy who replaces the word "pen" with the word "Frindle" because his English teacher told him words come from us. "Who says a dog is a dog? We do." This word spreads due to Nicholas (the boy) and his friends' efforts and eventually (when Nick is an adult) makes it into the dictionary. I loved this book because I found it fascinating that a kid could make something big like that happen (even though the book was fiction). So I always wanted to make a word of my own.
Making a word is easy and difficult at the same time, I think. Especially these days, once you create a word that is catchy, it's not that hard for it to suddenly breakout into common use. The internet has helped a lot. In Korea, there are so many new words being created and used by most young people that a TV program promoting the use of correct Korean words was created. This program is actually pretty good, because it brings back words that have kind of fallen out of use and also helps adults learn what the kids are saying these days. Most words are created by abbreviation, like "sel-ca" (a picture of you taken by yourself - "self camera") or "an-seup" (sad, like "It's sad that A is staying home on Friday night doing homework." - "an" from "angu," which means "eye," and "seup," from "seupgi," which means "vapor," meaning your eyes are watery). So for a person like me, who doesn't look at a lot of "popular" sites or play online games, which is where most of the neologisms are generated, it's hard to keep up with this newfangled language. I usually learn it pretty late, when all my friends start using it, but fortunately, I'm usually good at guessing the meanings of them.
There are many words popping up in the English language too. We "google" people, are supposed to avoid "sketchy" guys at Full Moon on the Quad, and "blog" about such new words. There's even a site that introduces new words that have come into the existence of our everyday lives: Word Spy.
Some words newly entered into the Merriam-Webster Dictionary in 2006 were spyware, supersize, ringtone, and drama queen. If you follow this link for the list, at the bottom you'll see a link for the new words in 1806, and it's pretty cool to see how commonly used many of them are now.
So with all these new words being incorporated into our everyday conversations, I had to disagree with Mr. Chomsky when I watched the YouTube video of Ali G's interview with Noam Chomsky, and Chomsky said to Ali that people would just ignore him if he made up a new word.
Well, now I've shown that it's obvious that words are created all the time, but how do they usually come about and how do they become "official" words?
Some methods that we most often use to create new words are:
1) Compounding - joining two or more morphemes together to make one word
ex) chairperson
2) Conversion - using a word from one part of speech in another part of speech
ex) eyeball; She's been eyeballing those shoes for weeks. (noun to verb)
3) Affixation - adding suffixes or prefixes to existing words
ex) deshopping; “to buy something intending to use it once, then return it for a refund”
4) Clipping - reducing longer words
ex) flu; from influenza
5) Blending/Truncating - mixing words together, using parts of them
ex) fanfic; fan and fiction
6) Acronyms
ex) imao; in my arrogant opinion (when I first saw this on Facebook, I had to google it)
7) Using brand names
ex) Xerox; copy
8) Borrowing words from other languages
ex)

AND MANY MORE OTHER WAYS!

And how are these newly created words entered into our dictionaries? Well, Merriam-Webster says they have editors that read a cross section of written material every day. They find new words or new usages of words and mark them. They collect these citations and enter it into their database. When they have sufficient citations (which shows wide usage) and a significant period of time has passed (which shows the longevity of the word), they add these words to their official dictionary!

In addition to words, we now have to decipher emoticons too. They add valuable information to written (or usually, typed) language, which has the disadvantage of not being able to see the person you're talking to or hear his/her intonation. I still don't know a lot of the emoticons used here because they're different from the ones in Korea. In Korea, ^^ or ^-^ is equivalent to :). (See the smiley eyes?) One I use often is -_- which is used when you're at a lost for words because what the other person said was stupid or made the situation awkward. I even use some of these emoticons when I write letters or notes by hand to my friends. When I think about how much language is evolving with the advancement of technology, I'm blown away sometimes.
We need new words for new things, like iPods. Sometimes words are ephemeral. They appear for a short time, usually describing or reflecting a cultural phenomenon, and then disappear.
Sometimes, we don't have words for certain things/emotions/situations. "The comedian Rich Hall gave us the word sniglet (an example of itself) for a word that should exist but does not. Eg, Elbonics n. The actions of two people manoeuvering for one arm-rest in a cinema." Babies make up words all the time, but they get lost as the babies grow up. My parents always told me how I used to call a watermelon (subak in Korean) "shabak." I'm sure we all have at least one of those. When I use Konglish, I say things like I'm "nora-ing" (playing), adding "-ing" to Korean verbs. People replace words that they can't think of with "whatchamacallits" and "thingys(thingies?)." And even though we don't use grammatically correct language, we understand each other just fine most of the time.
So why would Noam Chomsky say people would just brush Ali G off if he created a new word? Why can't there be a "frindle" in real life? I think he was just irritated by Ali and wanted to cut the interview short. Because language changes ALL THE TIME, and it's all OUR doing. So let's go out and create language!

http://english.unitecnology.ac.nz/resources/resources/exp_lang/new_word.html
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/book_extracts/article2474562.ece
http://www.m-w.com/help/faq/words_in.htm
http://meryl.net/2006/10/11/create-new-words-with-neologisms/