Well, when a mummy word and a daddy word love each other very much…
I’m not sure how good this explanation is –– plenty of words come from just mashing two other words together, but the process isn’t particularly sexy, and is far from loving. Words don’t come from a stork either, and they usually don’t turn up on doorsteps. So what’s left? Where do we get our newborn-little-linguistic-darlings from?
To answer this question, it is easier to treat words like things than people. Words are invented rather than born, and even if they seem to evolve organically, there is often someone behind them pulling the strings. Of course words are not like things, in that words most often come from poems and stories. I finish a book and leave it with a word that rattles and shakes around my head, scraping against bone until it claws its way out of my mouth. This is not a unique experience, I’m sure.
We should take a serious look at these invented words, what linguists call protologisms or neologisms. When an author or poet creates a new word, what are they implying? Of all the words out there, across every language, there is none that could possibly contain the meaning they wish to convey? Is the existing vocabulary hollow of beauty and meaning? Do the tools of language lack the depth of their mind? How narcissistic to think yourself better than words!
But words have to come from somewhere –– every so often narcissists must be correct. This is the risk of word-making, how to balance a desire for beauty and clarity with ego. This is a deeply shallow view, of course. I do not think one can be truly committed to the idea that the creation of words is narcissistic, without pinning it on the notion that language is a tool to shape meaning or beauty. If you dig deep enough, you will find that languages can be meaningful and beautiful in and of themselves. This ties into what makes a neologism a good or bad word; it is not enough to be invented thoughtfully, carefully and purposefully. It is entirely possible for a word to be delicately crafted, dreamed, woven, and atrocious. Still, I have my pet authors, who in creating their words reveal a part of myself to me, whose neologisms give a name to something that before only existed in the hollows of experience. In the end I cling to these words for no particular reason other than that they are beautiful.
Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle is supremely inventive, both linguistically and stylistically, in how it chronicles the end of the world. Vonnegut constructs a satirical reality that sits just above our own; San Lorenzo has its own set of doomsday weapons, eccentric dictators, languages and religions. Everything in Cat’s Cradle is fictional yet familiar, and the religion of Bokononism is no exception. Bokononism is deeply illegal, being punished by death via giant hook, but is practised by everyone in San Lorenzo in secret. My favourite aspect of Bokononism is its terminology: a bizarre set of neologisms that have yet to escape into English.
Cat’s Cradle is a ridiculous novel, but I promise there is some wisdom in its words, and one such word is foma. Foma in essence are harmless untruths, and they float through the text. Vonnegut often writes in foma, nonsensical jokes and lies that prove meaningful despite their inherent meaninglessness. The epigraph to the book stands out in particular –– “Live by the foma that makes you brave and kind and healthy and happy,” attributed to the Books of Bokonon. This is the very same book that opens with the paradox “close this book at once! It is nothing but foma!” In the word foma, Vonnegut really creates a framework that challenges notions of epistemology –– there is much more in a word than simply its definition. These harmless untruths make up everything;they are the atoms of culture, and the onus is on you to wrangle these lies into a network that brings you happiness. Foma reduces postmodernism, existentialism and critical theory — all these forces that attack the previously held ideas of culture and truth — into a single word. Vonnegut, in his simplicity and strangeness, creates neologisms with beauty.
This is what I find incredible about analysing neologisms, whether they are from Borges or Le Guin;, whether they are narcissistic or not, it feels difficult to assign any sort of value to them. Words, at least the ones I am interested in, come from authors and poets, but I am not sure what makes them good or bad, narcissistic or necessary. I only know that I love some and not others, and so neologisms, much like everything, are foma of a sort.
