Non-words

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Every once in a while we may find ourselves in a situation that calls for a word that doesn’t exist. Yet. The question is, what do we do when that happens to us? Do we invent the word that feels fitting? Or do we ‘WTF?’ it? Or put a word in with lots of stars instead of letters in order to make the word suitable for all languages (As if the younger ones amongst us don’t understand what we are saying... Hmmmm...)

Often the ‘right word’ is not easily found.
Sometimes it works to break up an existing word, giving its pieces a whole new meaning; a meaning that suits the situation. The other day I was watching a video of Swami Beyonananda, and he had a pretty good one:
The situation is the current economic situation, or as he said: the economic emergency. Which according to the Swami really means: ‘emerge and see’. Therefore the situation is not as foreboding as it seems; however it is forcing us to come to a new and different perspective on the current situation as we evolve into a different energy ~ as we are moving on.

Other times the name eventually becomes a verb ~ as happened with Google.

Whatever word we dream up is bound to be more creative than the ‘WTF?’ or the ‘f-multiple-star’ solution. And more articulate at that. And sometimes the new word ~ which at that point is still a non-word ~ only needs to convey a sense, a feeling, or an emotion. And then a sound can be enough. Or one can go for the abbreviation of a short sentence, like ‘woot!’ ~ literally ‘want one of those!’.

With the internet at our fingertips, relatively new words can change their meaning too. Like LOL. A columnist started the term which at that time meant ‘little old lady’. Now it pretty much universally stands for ‘laughing out loud’.

The nice thing is that language is a living thing that, like us and the world around us is in constant change. The new era allows us to experience new situations that call for new words. These new words start out as ‘non-words’; yet the ones that stick in our vocabulary eventually make it into our dictionary, at which point they have become well and true words in our language.

It is actually quite nice how that works!
And it all starts with a ‘non-word’ that somebody dreams up to describe a new situation.
What word would you dream up?
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