There are people who call me a wordsmith. (There are others who call me an idiot, but that’s another story!)
A friend’s sister has a better name: word-herder. [your sister’s blog reference here if still valid] Sometimes words are malleable and you can shape them any way you want. But then there are days when they steadfastly refuse to be moulded and they need to be herded. Like cats. Each one wants to go its own way and refuses to be coerced.
On those days I either give in to their demands and follow where they lead (see yesterday’s blog post) or I give up and find another topic to write about. Occasionally I choose a third option: although I don’t make up a new word like Edward Lear’s “runcible” spoon in his “Owl and the Pussycat” (my version of that is more true to life), I do sometimes transform an existing one so that it rhymes as Ogden Nash did. E.g. stupert which is a stupid version of stupid. It’s also how people with strong South African accents pronounce stupid. Or abhorrenge — a variant of abhorrent which rhymes with orange — just because there are no words that rhyme with orange. Until now, that is!
People have complained that it’s cheating but sometimes those words just have to be herded!
How do you get words to do what you want? Leave a comment below and let me know.