Word of the Day: Neologism
If you don’t know what neologisms are, you should know you use them all the time. A neologism is a new word or expression that finds its way into language. Such as “blog” or “email.” Now, I want to take a moment to point out Merriam’s second definition. I thought they might be joking with the definition, “a meaningless word coined by a psychotic.”
Once again, dictionary.com comes to the rescue and explains that a neologism can be a word made of combinations of other words that only the speaker understands. This is a psychological term used to describe some of the speech idiosyncrasies of schizophrenics. Now that’s a lot clearer that ” a meaningless word coined by a psychotic.” That definition could fit any number of utterances from our recent former President.
