Word Nerd

Making it Up as We Go Along

Today, class, we tackle the neologism, a fancy word for a made-up word. The general rule is: Writers will not use words that are not in Webster’s Eleventh, so help them God. But rules sometimes deserve to be flagrantly and gloriously broken (consider e.e. cummings and his licentious lowercase). The late Toni Cade Bambara was a master of the neologism, such as “monkeybardom” for the freedom kids feel at recess. And then there is the inimitable Anne Lamotte, who refers to the turkey wattles that dangle from the aging neck as “neckage” and “necular degeneration.”
Here at Trad Home, we look at neologisms with a gimlet eye but sometimes permit them, especially if it is Friday and we are in a giddy mood. Our own Mitch Owens, Senior Interior Design Editor in the New York office, got “glamorama” by us in a piece in our upcoming September issue on a revival of interest in ’50s design diva Dorothy Draper (how’s that for gratuitous alliteration?). Mitch called the new book, In the Pink, “a glamorama survey of Dorothy Draper’s work.” (It is ticking me off that even as I type, all the neologisms are hysterically underlined in red, just as if Miss Ryerson, my eight-grade grammar teacher, had been reincarnated into Word as a cyber scold.)
I would argue that not only is glamorama easily understood, but also that its multisyllabic flamboyance and the vaguely exotic-sounding consonant ending (Voilà! Arrivederci!) is just right for describing Draper. After all, “fuhgeddaboudit” isn’t in the dictionary either, but you don’t need Al Pacino as Donny Brasco to tell you its multipurposes: agreeing that Raquel Welch is sexy (“Fuhgeddaboudit!”); disagreeing that a Lincoln is better than a Cadillac (“Fuhgeddaboudit!”); exclaiming over something wonderful to eat (“Fuhgeddaboudit!”); and dismissing highly personal criticism of one’s anatomy (“Fuhgeddaboudit!”).
Our Senior Decorating Editor in Des Moines, Candace Manroe, writes like an angel—and so nonchalantly that you never even hear the flutter of her wings. She, too, is also partial to made-up words, but I balked at her coinage of “metropoliths” for large cities. For one thing, it thounded lithpy, and for another, metropolis is already a perfectly good word. Granted, the plural, “metropolises,” doesn’t trip off the tongue, but it is not so repulsive that it needs a replacement. Better just to avoid it in the same way that so many of us write circles around the dreaded “lie” and “lay” conundrum.
I agreed not to mark metropoliths, and instead wait to see if it made the other editors’ hair stand up. It did. Candace’s gracious surrender stood her in good stead when she described a homeowner’s leggy blonde daughter as “fashion-glam” in our June issue: we let it stay.
Our executive editor, Marsha Raisch, and I are of two minds when it comes to finding just the right word. She swears by her trusty Synonym Finder, which I believe all too often ends in using a word that sounds like it came from a synonym finder—say “Bacchanalia” for “party” when “get-together” will do. I prefer to assign my subconscious to search the black hole of my cerebral archives and then go on to another task in hopes that the right word will float up in the nick of time. When wording looks funny in a headline, however, Marsha and I nonetheless make a good team, having trauma bonded late one wintry night over blowing up 50 black balloons for a coworker’s decade-breaking Bacchanalia with just one air pump between us.
This week when I wrote blurbs for the September Table of Contents, I trotted out the immortal line, “The 1937 Georgian-style home of a pair of Pennsylvania empty-nesters evolves from dark and knickknacky to light and kicky.” I was relieved to find out “kicky” really is a word (meaning excitingly fashionable) but expected to have to do battle for “knickknacky,” which isn’t. When I asked if I could use “knickknacky,” our “Curmudgeon-In-Chief” Cynthia Mitchell (aka Copy Chief), already reduced to eating circus peanuts due to deadline stress, threw up her hands and growled, “Knickknacky, Paddywhacky, give the dog a bone!”
I took that as a yes.