Some Of My Favourite ‘Words’

I love words. I used to read and re-read dictionaries and vocabulary textbooks for fun. Not only that. I’d jot down words that I’d read and don’t understand …

… or just list down the ones I particularly like…

… Every few months, I’d re-type all the words I’d scribbled in the pages and alphabetise them to create my own quarterly dictionary …

… I’d find out the meaning and then construct sentences out of them, like back in school. No wait. We never did that in school. We did lousy useless things like decide who had better moral values: Ahmad who helped the old woman cross the road or Ah Seng who stole ten bucks from his uncle.

Anyways, I was reading Time magazine when I came across an article on the newfangled concept of Carrotmobbing. In it was the word ‘slacktivist’ – “slackers who care about causes just enough to sign online petitions … but lack the time, money or drive to do much else.” I love it!!! It’s absolutely brilliant!

Then I got that nice warm feeling that I usually get when I come across a clever neologism. And that reminded me of my dictionary – there’s a page in there where I listed some really cool neologisms, which I will now share with you:

1. Karmageddon: everybody sends out bad vibes; vibes so bad that the world explodes and we all die.
2. Decafalon: struggling to get through one whole day without caffeine.
3. Flatulence: the ambulance that picks you up after you’ve been flattened by a steamroller.
4. Cashtration: buying something that renders you permanently financially impotent.
5. Sarchasm: the huge chasm between someone with sarcastic wit and the one who doesn’t get it
6. Ignoranus: someone who is both stupid and an asshole – this is my favourite because I know so many of them!

Pedants and language purists will argue that hey, these are not Real Words. Aiya, if we were confined only to words inscribed onto the hallowed pages of Oxford or Merriam-Webster, where got fun? Then we can’t say things like “MSN me” or “stop googling him la”. And here in Malaysia, worse. We don’t just combine the meanings of two words to make up a new word; we combine a whole bunch of languages: “You don’t ter-gostan and step on his tilam la. After he mengamok then you know.”

For the record, I’ve used the above sentence before in reference to a little two-year-old terror who’d shriek to high heaven if anyone ever dared lay a finger on his mattress. I swear I’m not making this up.

So anyway, what’s the point of this post? Oh yeah, here it is:

1. People who read dictionaries are nerds.
2. It’s good to know words people don’t know – it makes you look smart.
3. I’ve run out of points.