Thread: Should Poetry Lets You Invent Words?

Language evolves and one the bestest of rules for me is the rule of inventions or Just inventions of new words. .
I feel that somehow Poetry or writing should greatly allow room for inventing words because they felt right at the time of writing a line say.
We do say one born every minute.
So why not with words, in Prose and Verses?

Absolutely, it happens all the time, I believe.

I found that sometimes readers are unsure about a word and therefore question the meaning of it/them.
I think we should embrace new sounding words just like we embrace happiness.
It is good for the soul

You are at liberty to invent a word but it helps if, by its context, it is relatively clear what the word means. If I just write:

wurtable you will have no clue as to the meaning of the word.

But if I write:-

"It was a wurtable sort of day, not exactly raining, but the mist was so heavy everything was saturated with water"

then you may deduce from the context that wurtable meant the sort of heavy mist that soaks as if it were raining, but the word doesn't relate to the situation.

If you are going to invent a word, then make it sound as if it may already exist, for illustrative purposes I have coined the noun drizzlemist^©, which sounds as if it already exists as it relates directly to the weather being described, which also gives us drizzlemisting^© drizzlemisty^© and drizzlemisted^©, so our sentence now reads:-

"It was a drizzlemisty sort of day, not exactly raining, but the mist was so heavy everything was saturated with water"

The day had already been drizzlemisted, so I put on a raincoat and a stout pair of boots.

I looked out of the window, saw the drizzlemist, and came to the conclusion that an umberella might be a good idea.

It was drizzlemisting outside so I decided to stay inside by the fire and catch up with my reading


Of course, the more famous you are, the easier it is to invent new words and have them accepted....

Hey thank you for that Bloggsworth....very interesting indeed.
You mean the context in everyhting is important.
Interesting thing about fame there...and here I am thinking Fame is Money and Money is everyhting.
It is good to know it isn't.
The question here is:
Can one become famous for inventing words ? Let's call them Words Genuises at work. What a title to be had!
More of an exciting concept than the other way around I'd say.

Originally Posted by Nacian

Hey thank you for that Bloggsworth....very interesting indeed.
You mean the context in everyhting is important.
Interesting thing about fame there...and here I am thinking Fame is Money and Money is everyhting.
It is good to know it isn't.
The question here is:
Can one become famous for inventing words ? Let's call them Words Genuises at work. What a title to be had!
More of an exciting concept than the other way around I'd say.

You might become famous, but remember, Shakespeare is not remembered for the few thousand words he invented (neologisms), rather more for the way he used them...

Read all about it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neologism

Some forms not only allow disambiguation or outright manipulation of tense, spelling, intent or definition but encourage it!

Examples: limericks and clerihews

fp

Lewis Carroll thought you could, and I think he did fairly well for himself.

I remember seeing an interview a while ago with a poet who was asked to define 'poetry'. He thought for a long time because he simply said that it couldn't be defined. I agree that the boundaries for poetry - if they are existent at all - are so far out of reach that you can do almost anything and call it poetry. That means inventing words, too, I guess.

Of course you can invent words. As has already been pointed out, the context is the key.

To quote Lewis Carroll.

`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

There is some sort of sense there, it catches a mood, but the last line is at best, vague. Still a wonderful poem.

I think better way to invent words is to find something that has no word for it and go from there. I invented the word "thurb" which is a word to use when you don't know a word for what you want to say. I gave it to my students when I was teaching. Examples:

I feel rather therbic today.
You guys stop thurbing around back there.
You can feel the thurb the artist put into that painting.
All that was left after the fire was the burnt wood, the ashes and the thurb.
I've got a thurby feeling in my stomach.

Get the idea? Thurb means whatever it has to mean. I think it's a great word.

It worked for the smurfs.

I've done it in a few of my pieces, I really enjoy finding new words or trying new spins on words, like "grotesquerie" or "burnbelly" or "periphery".

I think it can work out wonderfully, but you have to know that your reader will understand your meaning.

Edward Lear and Dr. Seuss both agree: neologisms are wubbulous and runcible.

when you invent new words, you must follow the rules to use the word roots, prefix and suffix that most people understand just like so many new scientific words. if you put letters at random to form a new word, no one can understand it. that's a failure of invention.