I am a wordnerd. I like words — from word histories and origins to new words and their genesis. A few years back I picked up Family Words by Paul Dickson. [Get the Book] It’s a collection of words coined by and used within families. Sometimes these words enter mainstream usage. My favorite word from that book is niblings to refer to nieces and nephews. (Since brothers and sisters are siblings….)

On my list to pick up on my next trip to the bookstore is Word Fugitives by Barbara Wallraff. Get THIS Book Based on a column for The Atlantic Monthly and excerpted over there, word fugitives are “holes” in the language — common phenomena that should have a word, but don’t yet. Wallraff and her readers relate the holes they have discovered and suggestions for words to fill the hole.

NPR recently held a contest “to find a word that describes the phenomenon of almost sneezing.” The results are posted here with many examples of suggested words. The most common submission was snizzle. The first runner-up (decided by All Things Considered staff) was an-tissue-pation. And the winner is sniff-hanger.

Technorati tags: Word Fugitives~~~

del.icio.us Tags:
Posted by Tim