Thursday, May 12, 2005

Neologistics

Squitter(s). I can hardly remember writing it. It has set my stats alight. Every other google-type search reaching this site seems to have been in the pursuit of more squitterly information. Sometimes pluralised, sometimes in the singular. Occasionally a diminutive plural; squits, and once in reduced form, squit. But it's squitters, the full term that excites the most attention, which is strange as I don't think it is an actual world. True I've used it, but that brings no authority, my fevered mind is always searching for a word to achieve an effect, and I don't let little things like the fact that it doesn't exist get in the way of what I hope is an effective image. Squits has been around since 1840 as street slang for diarrhoea, and squity has existed for a while as an adjective to describe an overly active anal expulsive condition and used as an informal explanation: 'Im not coming in for work this morning as my botty is feeling a bit squity.' But squitters? Perhaps this is one of those 'who got there first moments' - like the literary puzzle which asks whether it was Joyce or Wolfe who brought us ground- breaking stream of consciousness prose techniques. Both had been experimenting before 1920, but only one gets the accolade. Or who invented the vacuum cleaner? Again parallel discoveries leading to a winner/loser situation. Squitters has probably been slumbering in my slang dictionaries for years without my knowledge. And, (I'm too lazy to look it up,) I'm still in blissful ignorance believing I'm coining all over the place, when in fact I'm scattering cliches with gay abandon.

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