On the invention of words

In a box in my loft there exists a copy of a poem that I wrote at age about 15, to win some school prize. I think it was also published in the local newspaper at the time. What’s interesting is that it contains the following invented words: ‘fellswooping’ (referring to a ‘fellswooping hawk’) and ‘smithereened’. The latter has reappeared a couple of times in more recent pieces.

From OED Historical thesaurus

So it seems I was inventing words even 55 years ago, or at least generating verbs from nouns. Other examples occur in several texts I’ve written in the last couple of years. Sometimes this can be for poetic effect or for convenience. Often I think it’s also because the language available to us is inadequate for our needs, and it surprises me that this is seldom acknowledged. We behave and write as if language is like a complete box of materials with which we can accomplish all we could possibly need, and all we have to do is apply carpentry to make whatever we want. Thankfully, that’s not the case—language itself allows and encourages its own expansion, so that we can express more and learn more.