“Owl, wise though he was in many ways, was able to read and write and spell his own name, WOL, yet somehow went all to pieces over delicate words like MEASLES and BUTTEREDTOAST.”
~From Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day
The English language is a marvel of malleability. While there are some who will rage over the inclusion of slang terms into the dusty old upright corridors of Webster’s Dictionary, I am not one of them. I take a perverse delight in the confusions that result from the fluidity of modern language, and in no confusion do I take more delight than the made-up word.
Probably the primary reason that I do not censure the made-up word is that I have discovered I use a few of them myself. For example, today the auto-dictionary scolded me with its censorious little squiggly red line for using the word “agreeance.”
Surely agreeance is a word. I use it all the time: “if so-and-so is in agreeance, we’ll move on this.” “Are we all in agreeance?” Et cetera, et cetera. Except agreeance isn’t a word. The actual correct word is agreement. And so I was forced to acknowledge my own ignorance and be corrected by that bloody Microsoft paperclip. Guilty as charged.
Another set of words which cause a lot of confusion, and which result in descriptions of physically impossible feats, are figuratively and literally. Literally is shorter and therefore easier to remember, so is often used both for its actual meaning, and when people really mean figuratively. Literally means it actually happened as the words say it did – if someone literally jumped out of their shoes then you have a human being who has just levitated out of their Sketchers, and it’s probably time to call Ripley. If they didn’t actually physically jump out of their shoes, but were very scared (and perhaps demonstrated other amusing bodily feats, like wetting themselves) then they figuratively jumped out of their shoes. But literally sounds much more dramatic, and is thus much favored in cocktail party conversations.
My other particular favorite is irregardless. That is definitely not a word, although Websters caved and decided to add it with the definition of “the frequently misused synonym of regardless.” I suspect this made-up word was birthed from regardless and irrelevant, like some freaky centaur of ancient Greece, and I love it. But for the record, it's just plain regardless.
This word is extra fun because it’s often used by pretentious people who are including it in their sentence to sound smarter...
...but who are really just showing themselves, in fact, to be Wols.
For my friend T, who knows irregardless isn’t a word, and gleefully uses it anyways.
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