View Full Version : neologisms- looking for a specific types of prose or poetry
fantazjusz
11-28-2006, 03:51 AM
Hello,
I'm looking for books that contain lots of neologisms; by English-writing authors. I don't mean "Lord of the Rings" or other fantasy and science-fiction works, although they almost comprise a dictionaries of neologisms... but I rather mean modern or postmodern prose and poetry with untypical, weird or difficult-to-understand vocabulary, morphed, changed words and funny parts of speech. Have you come across such books or poems?
Thank you :)
fantazjusz
11-29-2006, 01:44 PM
umm... perhaps I should give you some examples just to show you what specifically I'm looking for:
a good example of a work with completely newly coined words would be either a poem "Jabberwocky" by Carroll or "Clockwork Orange" by A.Burgess.
What I'm looking for is a literary work that contains word morphing or word mutation, e.g. giving a certain part of speech suffix of another part of speech (which is incorrect grammatically, but perfectly comprehensible). Examples:
embiggen - to make something bigger
belittle - the opposite :)
goodguyness - a quality of being a good guy
and so on...
curse-words are perfectly OK :)
does anything come to your minds?
cheers! :)
Hmm well,
Riddley Walker is sort of along those lines, it uses an archaic form of English invented by the author himself.
genoveva
11-29-2006, 11:36 PM
James Joyce?
SummerSolstice
11-29-2006, 11:43 PM
Stole the words right out of my mouth with your reference to "Jabberwocky"! Carroll, Carroll, Carroll all the way on this one. He made up a bunch of words, and not just for the sake of nonsense--at least, not all the time. Many of them are common ones we use today. (Don't ask me for examples, because it's late and I'm tired. :P)
fantazjusz
11-30-2006, 06:55 AM
thank you :)
strange that I didn't think of Joyce and his "Finnegan's Wake" in terms of neologism creation. Of course.
I'll try Riddley Walker, I've never read anything from him, but from your description it sounds very tempting:)
if you happen to find anything new please let me know here, I'm very grateful already for your help, you helped me a ton.
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