Dearest Exalted Five Readers,
How many of you were esquivalient today?
I LOVE this. Words should run free! They should roam in the wilds. My favorites are always the free-range words. Egregious and truculent words! Then you've got your farm-bred words: calico and turtle and butter and squash and muddle. Then at the bottom of the barrel you've got the poor, opressed denizens of the cruel word-mills. Dog, and spit, and..."Mets". They are force-fed like geese without even the dubious honor of the opportunity to become foie gras.
We should all make up words for concepts that should exist but don't. And I don't care how long they are. Because, people....the Germans are beating us at this. Donaudampfschiffahrtselektrizateatenhauptbet- riebswerkbauunterbeamtengesellschaft! The FUCK! Are we going to let them get away with this? Alls we've got is that pneumomono....whatever it is, the volcano allergy thing, and THAT word was originally made up, too. The Welsh have Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch, and I'm sorry, but that just takes the piss.
I mean, we shouldn't be doing it just to get long words- that's just a perk. Words are such cool little beasts. You take them for granted, bad people. Older languages like Hebrew have very few words compared to English, and that makes it a lot more difficult to express certain concepts. The Japanese use neutral verbs like "give" or "get" in subtle ways to express disapproval but have nothing that we'd consider swears. English is like, wicked good.
All of which is to say that we should all be esquivalient as often as possible. I admit to a certain hypocrisy here, because I'm a stickler for proper grammar. And yeah yeah yeah, I know it's an ever-fluctuating, organic, blah blah blah blah. But still. Learn how to use a fucking semi-colon, you illiterate grunt. But for some reason I'm all for the coining of new words, whether it be out of whole cloth or misuse of linguistic rules or just by sticking a bunch of pre-existing words together. The difference? People use the "wrong" grammar because they're lazy, or sloppy, or don't think it matters. This angers me. Using words that previously didn't exist, on the other hand, is just creative. This makes me kvell. Which is a perfectly cromulent word.