What nonsensical words do you like to use in your not so everyday speech?
It’s kinda flipped from how most people think of it. Dictionaries don’t define which words the language contains–they just write down the meaning of words that people are using. Any word that’s used commonly enough will be added to the dictionary. Webster also has “rizz”, for example. That just popped into common usage a couple years ago and definitely wasn’t coined by a dictionary.
My favorite nonsense words lately have been from Australia. They have whipper-snippers, grow Warrigal greens, eat wombock, and chase off bin chickens. Giving language a purple-nurple is practically the national Aussie pastime.
I assume due to the rise in newspapers and literacy. People were getting all sesquipedalian. ie: Using enbiggened (first use in 1884) words to make themselves seem more educated and perspicacious.
There’s a German word, schnabulieren, which, though it has a totally different meaning, occupies the same niche as “to dis’ someone.” If you had to guess when they were from, you’d think the eighties, but it was actually the 15th century. “Schnabul-” comes from “Schnabel,” meaning “beak,” though in this case it’s more like “duckbill”, and basically “izate,” as a suffix. It means to snack, but really it’s more to snarf something. It was invented as a joke, to mix Latin and Germanic roots was considered funny at the time.
It would be a poor dictionary that excluded such a widely used word as “discombobulated.”
I’ve seen a few science videos from classrooms in the 1940’s/1950’s that legit use the word “recombobulate” in a scientific setting and I always thought it was funny as hell.
Which is funny as the word combobulate is a back formation from Discombobulate.
back-formation:
A term formed by removing an apparent or real prefix or suffix from an older term; for example, the noun pea arose because the final /z/ sound in pease sounded like a plural suffix. Similarly, the verb edit is a back-formation from the earlier noun editor.
There’s an airport in a US city, which has a “RECOMBOBULATION AREA” instead of an “ARRIVALS HALL”.
Which, given that the “welcome to…” sign that passengers first see on entering the terminal building names a totally different city in a totally different state to the one the airport is actually in, is probably very apt.
