Werifesteria

to wander longingly though the forest in search of mystery

“To Virgilius [Maro of Toulouse], the Latins that could exist are as significant as the one that does.”

--Vivien Law

You may have seen this word in a meme & thought it sounded a little fishy. It made quite an impact about ten or twelve years ago; it’s even the name of a band. You’re in the distinct minority if you know it originated with the Twitter project that became The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows (now a book). That neologist’s name is John Koenig. He’s a modern practitioner of an artform that used to be a sideline of poetry & by now has almost entirely diverged from it. Shakespeare coined a bunch of words (or was the first known user of them) at a time when this was no big deal. Just as Roman writers borrowed from Greek when they couldn’t find a word of their own, scholars in English felt entitled to do the same from Latin & Greek (& occasionally both at once).

In modern times Lewis Carroll has made a few, & at a time when Nonsense Verse (more or less contiguous with Children’s Poetry) was a viable genre, you might say he is the last survivor--& that, only because of his novels. Thereafter, skipping humorists like Ogden Nash & the far-superior Gelett Burgess (”blurb”), neologizing became the purview of ad-men & business types, & science fiction (do you remember where “grok” came from?)

Brian Aldiss contributed a short story composed entirely of definitions of invented words, which at once created a subgenre & exhausted it. (Thereafter, one can go toward Conlanging, or Worldbuilding, depending on your bent.) I wish that some of these had made it into general usage, instead of the novel slang that keeps bubbling up from the internet (can anyone keep up with it?); there’s seldom any nuance of meaning or frisson of poetry, & scifi itself has staggered into almost terminal pastiche meanwhile, as if to remind us that the stars will never be reached.

Sniglets was a publishing phenomenon; in the small press, Geof Huth (taking a leaf from Finnegans Wake) proposed the one-word poem, or “pwoermds”. Meanwhile philosophers continued inventing terms on a sporadic basis. (I fondly remember “grue” & “bleen”.) Geof asked me to define a few & i did. This wasn’t separate from my personal artlang, Glaugnea, though i never have put all my coinages in one place. (A preliminary Giyorbicon is available here. That was several hundred neologisms ago.)

Where are the neologizing poets?

“I should like to macadamize the world;
The road to Hell wants mending.”

--Festus