Tuesday, March 11, 2008

Making Up WOrds

Comment I made on:
Is you is or is you aint good with words?

I've tried making things up, but it's harder than I had thought!

1st thing: It has to be something original, of course - that's the hard part and the only reason it's hard is because of the second part.

Sure, I could say WAZOOJOWGA is a word (this one is of excitement), but if it's too complicated it's not memorable enough to stick, which is number three, memorability. Now that I've skipped a number lets get to number 2:

2nd thing: It has to make sense by looking or hearing it... Which makes number 1 harder, because you have to make up something that no one has heard before, yet still makes sense... and the nature of language has a way of naturally making up words that make sense on its own course of evolution: slang. Slang eventually becomes part of dictionaries and is eventually forgotten of as slang! lol... Take for example anyone from anywhere, they call the place they live something that sounds little like what it was originally pronounced... In New Orleans they call it "Norlans" and people in the US call Maryland "mare-uh-lind" all together... Originally I bet 5 cents it was likely pronounced "Mary-Land" from the Land of Mary... And I'm not a betting person.

I made up FANTABULOUS once! At least I think I maid it up, I had never heard anyone use it before... I just took a few words which basically had the same meaning (understandability), didn't really mean anything different (adding a cuteness factor), and memorable (sounds gaudy/cool/big), but I hadn't yet learned (though now I have from this example) that practicality (number 4) was very important... Which even though it's cute and cool, can't stand against practicality for very long, so it gets picked up, but trickles away leaving little trace...

Addded: Context Learning

I've also found the best way to introduce a word is nonchalantly, along the way, inconspicuously, etc... I've never really thought that much about why it works out best to introduce it that way, but I think it's because the meaning of the word can be assumed by its context... which is how we learn many words the context, whereas force-feeding ourselves doesn't seem to have as much of an impact... Look at the great idea, but universal language for example... I think we learn best through context learning because that's how we learn from the start... Think of a baby seeing a parent pointing at a star and saying star... Well the context would say since all of the actions were in one moment, that those actions may be related. In order to survive and progress, we must learn and adhere to this method of context learning, so things that may be learned in this 1st priority learning style have a higher chance of being learned, since this method of learning is likely most adept.

Another comment (though unrelated to this one, but) on the same site of the blogger, Carolyn, was posted on Why Aren't You Writing?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hi, David -- thanks for the link! :o)