Expologies and Apublogies: Darrel Bristow-Bovey Attempts to Coin New Words

Darrel Bristow-Bovey’s latest column for Random House Struik, “Coining new words, a sorry tale”:

For some time now, I’ve been trying to invent a new word. Well, that’s not quite true – I’ve invented plenty of new words, mostly late at night while enjoying a glass of liquid late-supper in the slightly furtive company of RuPaul’s Drag Race or Hoarders: Buried Alive!, but the trick is to get other people to use them too. Using a word that only you know to be a word is a fast trip to becoming that weird guy on your street whose TV is never off and who sometimes trundles out his wheelie-bin in his underwear and claims he owns a tortoise and sporadically makes strange sounds out loud. It doesn’t help when you explain that those aren’t strange sounds, those are new words you made up last night: your neighbours still regard you with civic suspicion, as though you’re about to invite their children to come over and see your tortoise again.

• Complete column: Random Reads

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