HOW-TO
Make Up Your Own Words
By Nathan Johnson
People get excited every year when Webster’s announces which new words made the dictionary, but there’s no reason to wait around for some big dictionary company to give you new words to incorporate into your vocabulary. You can start making up your own words right now. We’ll show you how.
The first step in making up new words is to pick out some existing words and phrases that you like. You can use these as the foundations on which to build your new words.
Once you’ve got some good raw materials, you can start the process by using basic addition. And you were thinking there was no math involved in language! Actually, there are some more complicated formulas you can use (Pythagorean Theorem anyone?), but you should wait to try those out after you’ve mastered the basics.
OK, so let’s begin with a simple example using addition. We’ll keep it business-focused so you can impress your co-workers and/or bosses (if you use this in a PowerPoint presentation, please let me know).
A lot of companies serve a core horizontal market, right? The two words you should be focused on there are “core” and “horizontal.” We can add them to create an entirely new (and totally awesome) word.
core + horizontal = corizontal
You may be wondering why the “core” portion had to be used for the beginning of the word. This is where your common sense has to be added to the equation. We could just as easily have created the word “horicore,” but that doesn’t sound nearly as good, and it’s a lot more confusing. It’s the “zontal” part of the word that indicates that it derived from “horizontal.”
Now let’s apply the same formula to address core vertical markets.
vertical + core = verticore
And if you’re trying to target your corizontals and verticores with the right messaging, don’t use vertically integrated marketing. Use “vertigrated” marketing.
See how easy it is!
Another quick trick to add flavor to your new words is to use versatile suffixes like “tastic” – pulled from “fantastic” or “licious” – pulled from “delicious.”
Some business-style examples include the following:
- executastic – describes items pertaining to the executive team
- financialicious – indicates something of tremendous financial benefit
- techtastic – describes a technology setup that will help you maximize efficiency, increase market share, speed time-to-market, bring world peace, etc.
- convergelicious – describes elements that converge perfectly
Start with these simple word-building tools and branch out as you gain confidence. Before you know it, you’ll be inventagizing new ways to develop words, and your entire vocabulary will be creatorifficly futurized.
E-mail the author: Nathan Johnson