I like to make up words. I’ve been doing it fairly regularly for about seven years now, ever since I had a conversation on Instant Messenger when I kept having the same typo over and over again. The word ot, meaning also, was born that night. It wasn’t just an effort to justify my typo, the entire conversation was about the nature of language and where words come from. The ultimate deciding factor as to if it were acceptable for a person to just invent new words came down to one sentence:
“If Shakespeare can invent over fifty words, including assassin, suspicious and bump, I don’t see why you can’t make up your own words.”
So, I did, and I haven’t stopped. In the spirit of Shakespeare, and Joss Whedon, most of my invented words are derivative from more established words. A few come entirely from myself, but I don’t share those consciously, because I got tired of trying to explain them.
It’s not the same as having bad grammar, of course. Poorly structured colloquial phrasing drives me insane. If a word already exists and has a proper way of using it, use it that way. Not that I’m a Grammar Nazi. I’m sure that if you’ve read more than one post here on MABrotherton.Com than you’ve noticed I have trouble with some rather simple grammatical concepts, like the difference between its and it’s. I often have to replace “it” with “he” and see which one looks okay. “Hes” just isn’t a word that even looks right in my eyes, so I know that I need to use an apostrophe.