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Calling All Word Manglers!
What exactly do you call those noises your car makes after
you shut off the engine and start to walk away?
Carcophony? Cartunes? Nash Rumblers? Toyotahhs?
Any of the above new terms for one of those annoying clinking-clanking sounds is known as a neologism. Who would have thought such a serious sounding word as “neologism” could be so fun?
Dictionaries define a neologism as a recently created word, sometimes resulting from a combination of words. Since inspiration and madness are close cousins, it’s not surprising that The American Heritage Dictionary also incorporates this passage into their definitions of neologism: “The invention of new words regarded as a symptom of certain psychotic disorders, such as schizophrenia.”
But you don’t have to be insane to come up with neologisms. Just ask illustrator and author Michael Kline, who has made a successful career out of changing and rearranging words. He’s the illustrator of 25 books, including WordPlay Café, which teaches children to have fun with the English language. He also authors and illustrates the WordPlay Café neologisms blog, which runs a weekly contest seeking neologisms to partner with his illustrations.
The results of people’s manglings are quite clever. As an example, here are some past winners:
What do you call it when you forget to attach a file to an e-mail?
1st place: Mailnutrition
2nd place: Filefaux pas
3rd place: Dettachments
Honorable mention: ADD - Attachment Deficit Disorder
If you’d like to mangle a few words yourself, you can enter the contest (or just look at the clever past entries) by going to WordPlay Café. The first-place winner gets his choice of a copy of the WordPlay Café book, or an original, autographed sketch of the illustration on which the winning entry was based.
Review by Carla Chadwick. Copyright 2007 WordPlayBlog.com
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