Help Me Invent a Term

What's that thing for when you want to create something but you're afraid of the burden it might put on you once it has been created? Something something phobia?

Imagine inventing a word that's used by millions of people every day. Would you fight for recognition? Would you use the term daily, forcing its square frame into every conversation’s round hole? You’re like a small business owner whose every article of clothing frames a logo, no matter the occasion. “I’m sorry about your loss,” you say to a grieving daughter at her mother’s funeral. “Your loss of all that empty space in your apartment after you come on down to Phil’s House of Phurniture, off I-35 and Santa Fe!”

Or do you remain quiet? Maybe not out of humility or even not as an aversion to Phurniture Phil’s obnoxious lack of social tact, but instead in service to the weight you’ve unwittingly placed upon yourself? Imposter syndrome stemming from a single, early success.

Do you pigeonhole yourself, never moving far from your trademark word for fear that you'll be untethered from it and so have your legacy drown out by so much subsequent comparative banality? The only way to stay relevant is to stay quiet. You ride your initial fame, like a one-hit wonder, but unlike most such wonders, you gracefully retreat from the stage.

Sure, maybe you aren’t satisfied with your single-waypointed legacy, but you respect the shadow it has cast. Where some word artists may follow up their surprise hit “cacophony” with a sophomore attempt like “blastical” or “favrincol” to an uninterested audience that has already moved on to sold-out shows featuring “riposte” and “serendipity,” you instead relax into silent acceptance. “Cacophony” alone was good enough for you.

Besides, how would you even prove that you are the inventor of the universally praised “verisimilitude?” Would you record your voice and depend upon the file meta-data’s creation date as enough evidence for the U.S. Copyright Office? Or do you photograph the shape of your mouth making the word? Maybe even apply a sepia filter to give the impression of age, of gravitas, of proof in the way early photographic documentation can.

This is my great-great grandfather inventing the word “mervelt.”

I’ve been on the lookout for great words my entire life. I scout them. I’m like a talent agent, looking for words to represent. This hasn’t always worked out for me. Early in my agent career I scouted an entire phrase, having not yet even proven myself capable of single words.

Years ago, the late 1990s, a commercial for Sprite featured three streetball-playing men pushing the soda onto viewers with all of the bravado and forced intimidation that came to represent that time period. Suddenly, the director of the commercial yells “cut!” and these three men soften to a stereotypical representation of effeminate males who are more aligned to classical stage theater than to the basketball court. It’s a hard commercial to watch in 2023. Enjoy:

That commercial taught me…well, showed me, the phrase “what’s my motivation.” I was, at that time, part of a high school play called “You Can’t Take It with You,” and as my small-town school with limited resources would imply none of the student actors came up as “theater kids.” At our school, the only options for personality alignment were sports and other sports. Oh, some kids were farmers, but in such a small town, farming was essentially a sport.

I understood the concept of motivation, of course, but when presented in the context of an artistic production I imparted a unique meaning upon it. Like how “break a leg” doesn’t really mean break a leg. “What’s my motivation” must have meant “what is the key to this scene,” I rationalized. So, in the middle of my English/Theater teacher giving direction to a separate group of unguided high school students/linebackers/farmers, I asked “what’s my motivation?” She stopped mid-sentence, obviously confused by my audacious interruption, but surely equally confused by the sudden appearance of this phrase that she had never taught to us.¹ Her simple response: “Your grade.”

Hindsight would show me what a perfectly concise and piercing burn that was, made especially so because it came from a teacher who trafficked more in the “hippy, free-spirit” method of acting than in the “no-nonsense, tough-love” method that might have better served her insult. But at the time, I didn’t know. I accepted the direction as though it were sincere, focusing on what “your grade” meant to my character. I never found that meaning.

Years later, my own sons would unintentionally manifest interesting words. Their creations generally arose from their young vocabularies devoid of existing suitable words. For example, my oldest, at the age of six, coined the term “knee armpits” to refer to the back of the knee. The layman would say simply, “kneepits,” but I loved the window into his mind, his understanding that words can be broken down and melded together. That same son, earlier in his life, at the age of four, once yelled out to his mother and I that he had an itch on his “penis cheeks.” He meant scrotum.

Perhaps most impressive was when my youngest son, about the age of four, coined the term “whobody,” as in, “whobody stole my cake‽” It’s a word that both accuses and asks, perhaps the only word in the English language that demands an interrobang. I love this word because it serves a legitimate purpose rather than new slang words, for example, which just serve to offer a decorative flair to existing words. “Whobody” makes the English language more efficient. To capture the same statement and question, our language prior “whobody” would have to declare both “somebody stole my cake!” with a follow up “who was it that stole my cake?”

Not long ago, I made what I feel is my only valid contribution to the English language. This time, not as a scout, but as a talent.

Ludoanthropomorphic dissonance. noun. [loo-doh nar-uh-tiv dis-uh-nuhns]: the tension caused when human-like characters in video games behave in non-human-like ways, generally to the benefit of gameplay. Because of the game’s ludoanthropomorphic dissonance…which, as an aside, is a super cool term probably invented by a very handsome guy, I'm able to enjoy this game's stealth sequences.

To my knowledge, ludoanthropomorphic dissonance has only been used once…by me, of course. I detail it in my essay “Being a Ninja is Easy in a World Full of Idiots.” Check it out:

Being a Ninja is Easy in a World Full of Idiots

Ludoanthropomorphic dissonance falls into categories of word-birthing that, embarrassingly, feels a bit lazy. The three categories of word creation are:

1. The word is fun to say. The definition comes later. Most sexual positions, I’m convinced, originate here. Only once someone said “Cleveland steamer” did someone then imagine what such a concept would look like. You cannot convince me otherwise of this. Nobody first desired the thing and then named it.

2. Hijack an existing term. Take a term that contains pieces of an unnamed concept and modify it. This often relates to #1, because the hijacking of a term often starts with letting that original term dance around in your tongue for a bit until it finds purchase in an unnamed concept. Ludonarrative dissonance already existed before I molded ludoanthropomorphic dissonance out of it.

3. Work backwards from the concept. Here is the most noble method of word creation. The unnamed concept rules all. Out the window with your dancing tongue. Forget about what’s come before. When you find an unnamed concept out in the world, you get to name it, like an Oceanographer gets to name new species of marine life. Protip: name a concept, already named in another language, that has no English equivalent. Steal the Danish word hygge, for example, which means an especially strong feeling of coziness and comfort, often associated with a comforting routine. Give me your English equivalent in the comments.

Ludoanthropomorphic dissonance is #1 fun to say and #2 a modified theft. Maybe I’ll create a #3 someday.

Behold the Sarcastic Fringehead…yeah, that is its real name.

I’ve always had this desire to create. Not just words, but basically every media I enjoy. I read a book, I want to write a book. I play a video game, I want to make a video game. I listen to a podcast, I want to make a podcast. It’s exhausting, honestly, and is the main reason I stopped watching movies and TV shows (my passive, visual media intake now is limited to YouTube videos, which I did create for many years).

So what’s the term for that? What can I say when I want to express the tension resulting from a desire to create but a fear of creation? Something paralysis? Something phobia? Cherophobia is the fear of happiness. Neophobia is the fear of new things. Maybe cram those together? I need a new term for the state of avoiding potential happiness due to the awareness of its opportunity cost.

Help me create this term. Give me your suggestions in the comments.

1. Even she must have known that teaching us theater theory isn’t worth her time given the lack of general support at the school for a theater personality.