…The editors of Merriam-Webster dictionaries got more than 3,000 entries when, in a lighthearted moment, they asked visitors to their Web site to submit their favorite words that aren’t in the dictionary.
…Some of the proposed words even gained multiple submissions so the editors came up with an unofficial Top 10 list.
First place went to ‘ginormous’ — bigger than gigantic and bigger than enormous — followed by ‘confuzzled’ for confused and puzzled simultaneously, and ‘whoot,’ an exclamation of joy. A ‘lingweenie’ — a person incapable of making up new words — placed 10th.” (Yahoo! News)
Let’s get serious. ‘Lingweenie’ is far more clever than the other examples, involving a double entendre as it does. IMHO, neither ‘ginormous‘, ‘confuzzled’, or ‘whoot’ really adds anything to the lexicon, since — duh — conveying that something is bigger than ‘gigantic’ means it is also inevitably bigger than ‘enormous’; usually, someone who is confused may be said to be puzzled too; and most joyful exclamations are both somewhat whoop- and hoot-like. Lingweenies indeed; it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to just conflate two synonyms… which is why, I guess, these words are not only not in the dictionary but probably will never be. I have never heard any of these terms used in conversation either — have you?That is possibly because I don’t hang with the right crowd, but I do hear my children and their peers do use ‘bazillion’ and ‘gazillion’, I’ll grant you that. You want neologisms by the bazillion, most of which are similarly destined for obscurity? See here.
I have seen far more clever word coinage compilations in The Atlantic‘s language columns in years past, BTW.
On a related topic, I heard an attorney interviewed on a radio broadcast today refer to her client, whom she felt had been unjustly accused, as an ‘escape goat’, and it didn’t sound as if she was deliberately trying to be clever. It really is a ‘doggy dog world’ out there for legal practitioners these days, isn’t it?
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