It's All A Bit Of A Blur Really

Vocabularian is a made up word. It has though, a legitimate meaning and is defined by new word dictionaries as ‘a person who makes up new words.’ In that regard I suppose I’m something of a vocabularian myself, though not from any efforts towards stylistic show offerry, or as a demonstration of poetic or prose writing originality, (though I do like to gussie up the commonplace), more a case of a word blindness condition which could be described as part tip-of-the-tongue syndrome, part lexical memory impairment. Usually, I know which word or words I’m seeking. I always know they exist, and that somewhere, this shady sense impression of a word squatting silently in a dark corner of my consciousness, stubbornly slumbering and refusing to be configured with letters or sounds, won’t come to me without eye-scrunching thought prods and pleading provoke pokes. And that it wont be there until it has been dragged, nail-screechingly, wild-eyed and blinkingly, into service. And all this takes time. More time than fluency allows.

So I have to resort to some vocabularian techniques. If I’m not end up speaking like Lurch from The Addams Family – perhaps with a little of the base turned down – or writing with the speed it took to get the Yongle Dadian published, I have to be a little inventive. I rationalize this by means of – well somebody has to if language is to remain dynamic and evolving. Perhaps we’re all inventors. All neologism coiners. Apparently you can now squinch something into a tight corner or space. Squeeze must have been sought, but somebody’s squeeze went missing, and there was a need for their creative side to bail them out as their memory was failing at a crucial time. Squinch. I like that word: “Take a note of that word squinch Darling,( as Blackadder’s General Melchett nearly said) I want to use it more often in conversation.” And squinch is in there, readied for validation.

It's an example. There will be more.