Rat Man wrote:
What?? They don't mean anything?! They could mean anything or everything! They mean whatever the creator of the word wants. Like "orc" or "lightsaber" or "agnostic" (yes, that was made up on the spot). I thought you would have grokked this by now.
Yes, yes, I'm actually fully aware that, first of all, every word has to have been made up at some point
*, and second of all, that many such words are entirely cromulent. (In other words: "
Back off, man, I'm a scientist."
)
I was just obliquely questioning the idea of "
guess what I'm thinking of"
being any fun. Also, "
monkiness"
is incorrect, if it pertains to monkeys; the proper noun form would be "
monkeyness"
. (You can't deny the inherent humanness of people as opposed to the inherent monkeyness of marmosets.) "
Monkiness"
is the property of being monky, and monky means "
resembling a monk"
, so "
monkiness"
is "
the state of being like a monk"
. ("
I wanted to like the class I took from Brother Francis, but in the end his monkiness got in the way of his open-mindedness during discussions."
) You're welcome to make up words, but the rules of English morphology are still the rules of English morphology.
*This is only true of English. French words are not made up; they're uncovered in word mines near Lyons and shipped to factories in Paris, where they undergo rigorous testing for authenticity. Words that don't meet the standards of the Academie Française are exported to Belgium.
[Last edited by Tahnan at 04-29-2011 07:21 AM]
What're yours?