“affluence test, artspeak, barfsome, beefcakeosity, blubsome, bodywhomping, campylobacteriosis, clamorous reed warbler, cyberwidow, depurpleise, earwitness, Education Action Zone, fibroephithelial, hamburger junction, horseburger, japeful, jelly-bagging, middle youth, Othello syndrome, pancuronium bromide, Patagonian toothfish, People’s Monarchy, petrol-head, portfolio career, pre-millennial tension, quantum computer, rocktabulous, schlockbuster, story arc, stylephile, telangiectasia, Teletubbified, trammel-netter, truncus arteriosus, woo-woo book, xenozoonose. “ –The Guardian
This article talked about if some words we read are actually indeed words. As we learned earlier in the semester about coinage, blending, compounding, etc., we know that there are many words in our language now that weren’t there before. I’m sure a word like blogging was not heard of back in the 1800’s because they didn’t have blogs then. Now with the increased technology, we are creating new words. While those words originated in Britain, I’m sure that we use some of them here. What I found more interesting was the ending of the article. It introduced me to some other morphological formations than we studied in class. One was extending set phrases. This is a two or perhaps more word phrase that keeps base words and changes the modifier. The example that the article gave was road rage could be changed to phone rage. They also talked about playing with language. The funniest example was black-water rafting instead of white-water rafting. We could do that with a ton of our words because we apply gender biased or here color biased terms. Some people may disagree whether certain words are actually words and the article related that lexographers can’t fit every word in a dictionary. They have to draw a line somewhere, so even though a word might not be in the latest dictionary, it could indeed still be a word.
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