Mark​​​​ Canada, Ph.D.​

Does this experience sound familiar?

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You're chattering away about something--regaling your friends with a captivating story, perhaps, or plumbing the depths of the human condition with a like-minded sage--and you can't think of a word to express something.  If you were writing alone in your garret, you could take some time to fill this lexical gap, but your audience is hanging on your every word--and now you don't have the right one!  You can't very well stop the conversation so that you cook up an acronym or toss a few words in the blender and see what comes out.

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What did you do?

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Well, I wasn't there. (I mean, I would remember that fabulously regaling story or that mind-expanding discourse, right?)  Still, I'll bet I can tell you what you did.  You reached into your vast storehouse of affixes, tacked one onto a familiar word, and created a new word that fit fairly neatly into your sentence.  Then you probably said something like "Is that even a word?"  People laughed, and you went on with your story or your conversation.

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How do I know what happened?  I have heard this kind of thing happen over and over again, and there's a good reason.

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You remember affixation from last week's column, right?  (By the way, AI clearly doesn't remember.  When I tried to type that word in the last sentence, it tried to tell me I meant "a fixation."  Unlike me, AI apparently does not have a fixation on affixation.)

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Affixation is the process of adding an affix (that is, a meaningful sound or collection of sounds) to a word, often to create a new word.  We saw an example in last week's column in the word Orwellian.  The -ian on the end of that word turns the noun Orwell into an adjective, Orwellian.  Similarly, we can add -ate to turn the adjective active into a verb, activate, and -tion to activate to create the noun activation.  These affixes change the classes of words, but we also can change the meanings of words with affixes such as un- and anti-.

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What seems to happen (at least in the speeches and conversations that I hear) is that a speaker knows a word with relevant semantic qualities--that is, relevant  meaning--but needs to alter it to make it fit in the sentence or to change its meaning in some way.  For example, maybe you have a teacher like the one played by Ben Stein in the movie Ferris Bueller's Day Off, and you have just come out of yet another boring lecture.  You ask your classmates, "How is it he can dullify even something as interesting as the Space Race?"  Similarly, if you are frustrated with a series of flight delays, you might grumble that the airline needs to figure out a way to undelay your flight.  In the first case, you turned the adjective dull into a verb by adding -ify.  In the second, you reversed the meaning of the verb delay with the affix un-, which means "not."

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There's actually a term for this kind of on-the-spot coinage.  It's called a nonce word, meaning it's invented for the moment.  In many cases, there probably is an existing word for the meaning you want.  In the second example, the word expedite carries roughly the same meaning (although undelay is more humorous and does carry a little nuance, as it suggests removing the delays rather than simply speeding up the process).  In this sense, then, many nonce words don't actually fill lexical gaps in the language, even if they do fill gaps in your vocabulary at a particular moment.  In other cases, though, your nonce word could be just what the language needs.  I don't know of a verb that means "make boring."  Maybe dullify has a place in English.

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Even if it does, though, there's no guarantee that it will catch on and wind up pervading the language to the point where it earns a spot in a dictionary.  If Ferris or one of his friends had used it, then the popularity of the movie could have helped move it into everyday conversation.  Alas, however, I was not consulted to wordify that film's script.