Trust words to come together and coin new ones. Words have this innate ability to get together and form new ones that not only reflect the truth better but can sometimes have a forceful impact. Let me give a few examples of words that one may never find in a dictionary but are, nevertheless able to communicate.
What if we are looking for someone who is treacherous by nature and is also ungrateful to a kind act done for them. Such people or such acts can easily be treachureant. Treachureant could be a recipient of kindness who turns against their own benefactor.
You have all heard of the benevolent benefactor… at least I remember one from ‘Great Expectations’ written by Charles Dickens. But then what about those who respond to an act of benevolence with words or actions that harm their benefactors? I always thought Pip from the book I have referred to was banevolent if we go by the way he behaved. He responded to benevolence with harm.
Let us see if love and stupidity can be blended to form an unfamiliar word that does the job. How about lovidity? Sounds appropriate for describing moments when emotions override logic. I have coined this one as lovidity seems to be far more common than just stupidity or only love. The word does capture the reckless head-over-heels feeling when love makes us all act a little foolish.
Strugullible. Yes, we have all been strugullible at one time or the other, haven’t we? Imagine the times when we struggled with insurmountable problems and once the solution is found, we discover to our indignation that our senior has taken all the credit for our hard work. We are then nothing short of being strugullible!
Truth as it exists and the truth as we think it exists is a part of the experience of all of us. In such cases we are simply diving into verithink. The word blends verity or truth as it exists and our perception of truth. That gap there remains unnoticed by us is the gap between objective reality and our subjective understanding of it. So yes, verithink is more common than we will dare to admit.
It is easy to go on with such non-existent words and something tells me that writers can be bold enough to coin and use them whenever they want to. Editors will be aghast. Readers may be on the verge of rejecting them. But time may some day accept them. I can dare to call such attitudes of readers and editors as fluxceptance. The word obviously is a friendly acceptance of a constant flux in language that is apparent all around. It has been so for ages.
Therefore, fear not your dive into creative interpretations of life. Go ahead and bring together words. Stand by your impulses and, who knows, you may live long enough to see them being used everywhere. We already have an extensive list of words that were not being used earlier… in some cases, unfamiliar words have popped out of nowhere in the past few decades. Look at selfie (self-taken photograph, typically with a smartphone), binge-watch (watching multiple TV shows in a single sitting), ghosting (cutting off communication with someone without an explanation), hangry (when one is both hungry and angry), glamping (camping with modern comforts), mansplain (when a man explains something to a woman in a condescending way), sharent (parents who overshare a child’s life on the social media), unfriend (removing someone from a social media friend list), and nomophobia (fear of being without a mobile phone). If words love being married to other words to tell something that has never been told before through words that existed in any dictionary, who are we to deny them this pleasure in an unstoppable way?
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Arvind Passey
Written on 22 February 2025
