Neologisms in the English language                                                     
They just creep up into the usage

What do we understand by a complex word such as ‘neologism’? Don’t worry it’s not something very difficult to understand. By just breaking the word into parts we will be able to ascertain the meaning to a large extent. Neo- means ‘new’ and ‘logism’ is derived from the Greek word ‘logos’ and ‘ism’ is a distinctive doctrine or practice. Therefore, the meaning is the practice of using new words. According to the dictionary it means new usage or phrase, or a new sense or even a combination of words to mean something. So, in all eventualities, it boils down to meaning the putting of new words into practice. Neologisms have become widespread in the English language. The rapid growth along with reach of the language has necessitated this openness in the language. The introduction of new technologies demands this scale of the functioning. It’s almost identical to the spread of technology. Instead of inventing new words, functional new words are devised to get the message across using variations of the existing words for example, ‘Dickensian’ is used to describe something to do with poor social and economic conditions. Our vocabulary is liberally interspersed with neologisms. Some of them are so well ingrained that some of us do not even know the origin of the word but are comfortable with its usage. Like the phrase ‘Catch 22’ is so commonly used by everybody with many not having read the book by the same name to which it owes its origin. Neolo-gisms just creep up into the usage and become popular. Literature has its knack of throwing up neologisms. Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll is generally considered to be the greatest of all nonsense poems in English. It is so well known that a number of its nonsense words or neologisms have entered the Oxford English Dictionary. Lewis Carroll has been called “king of neologistic poems” because of this. Some nonsense words are ‘brillig’ which means the time of broiling dinner, ie, the close of the afternoon, ‘slithy’ (compound of slimy and lithe) meaning smooth and active and ‘mimsy’ meaning unhappy. Typically neologisms can also be created by rhyming with existing words or by just playing with sounds. ‘Scrooge’ from the book ‘A Christmas Carol’ is one word which will always be remembered in the annals of neologism. In fact the word scrooge has become synonymous with the word miser universally. The word ‘quixotic’ that means extravagantly chivalrous or romantic owes its origin to the book ‘The adventures of Don Quixote’ by Miguel de Cervantes.

Neologisms are common among the youngsters who coin words according to contemporary trends in clothes, music or could be anything. Such neologisms rarely stay in the language for long. They come and go. I feel the literary ones or even the technical ones have a greater staying power and are continued in usage. Management and science and technology are areas where neologisms erupt quite frequently. Another extremely innovative area is the internet. The number of accepted neologisms in this field is pretty high; in fact many of them have been accepted by linguistic experts paving their way into the dictionary. Some interesting neologisms since 1994 being complainy which stems from ‘ whines and complains’, customer-management means portfolios of customers, arranged according to expected lifetime purchasing value. Communi-copia describes any company with multi-media pretensions, companies at the cutting edge of convergence between television, telephony and computers. Thinny is the counterpart of skinny.