Of course, we might ransack the back numbers of the language and dig up archaic words. Many such have been dropped from the original Anglo-Saxon. There is “Dindle,” to shake, and “Foin” to thrust, and “Gree” and “Lusk” and “Sweven.” But the need for most of them has long gone by. We do not “Feutre” our spears, because we have no spears to feutre. We carry no “Glaive,” we wear no “Coif.”
So with the bright gems of Elizabethan diction. A “Bonnibel” is now a nectarine. To “Brabble” is now to “Chew the rag.” What is a “Scroyle”?—a “Cad,” a “Bad Actor”? A “Gargrism” has become “A Scream.” So the old names become mere poetic decorations. Why, the word “Fro” we dare use only in a single collocation! And as for “Welkin,” “Lush,” and “Bosky”—who dares to lead their metric feet into the prim paths of prose? Let bygones be bygones. Look elsewhere.
Samoa has an ideal language, and there it was I got my inspiration. Can’t we make English as subtle as Samoan? I wondered. There they have a single word, meaning, “A-party-is-approaching-which-contains-neither-a-clever-man-nor-a-pretty-woman.” Another beautiful word describes “A-man-who-climbs-out-on-the-limbs-of-his-own-breadfruit-tree-to-steal-the-breadfruit-of-his-neighbor.” “Suiia” means “Change-the-subject-you-are-on-dangerous-ground.” Another happy word expresses a familiar situation—“To-look-on-owl-eyed-while-others-are-getting-gifts.” Have we anything in English as charmingly tactful as this? No, our tongue is almost as crude as pidjin-English itself, where piano is “Box-you-fight-him-cry.”
But the time has come for a more scientific attempt to enlarge the language. The needs of the hour are multifarious and all unfilled. There are a thousand sensations that we can describe only by laborious phrases or metaphors, a thousand characters and circumstances, familiar to all, which shriek for description.
It has, of course, been tried before. Think what a success the scheme was when it was so long ago attempted. The first Nonsense Book containing really new words was published in 1846 by Edward Lear, but he failed to appreciate his opportunity. Of all his names, the “Jumblies” alone survive. Lewis Carroll later went about it more deliberately. His immortal poem, “Jabberwocky,” has become a classic; but even in that masterpiece, how many words are adapted to modern use? “Slithy” perhaps and “Chortle”—though no one has ever been able to pronounce it properly to this day. Oh yes, “Galumph,” I forgot that. Not even “The Hunting of the Snark” has made the title rôle popular amongst bromides. Why? His fatal rule was, “Take care of the sounds and the sense will take care of itself.”
A dozen years ago a little girl tried it with fair success. In her “Animal Land, where there are no People,” however, I can find no word I have ever heard used outside its covers, no word like “Hoodlum,” or “Flunk” or “Primp,” “Quiz,” “Cabal” or “Fad” or “Fake.”
The thing must be done, and so I did it. Slang is sporadic; its invention is crude and loose. It is a hit-or-miss method, without direction or philosophy. Our task is serious; we must make one word blossom where a dozen grew before. A myriad necessities urge us. I found myself often confronted with an idea which baffled me and forced me to talk gibberish. How, for instance, can one describe the appearance of an elderly female in plush dancing a too conscientious tango? How do you, gentle reader, portray your emotion when, on a stormy night, as you stand on the corner the trolley-car whizzes by and fails to stop for you? Where is the word that paints the mild, faint enjoyment of a family dinner with your wife’s relations?
You see how inarticulate you are, now, don’t you, when a social emergency arises?—when you want to give swift tongue to your emotions? What can you say when you’re jilted?—how mention the feeling of a broken finger-nail on satin—your esthetic delight in green-trading-stamp furniture? How do you feel with a person whose name you cannot quite remember? Why, we need at least a gross of assorted nouns this very day! What is the name of a business enterprise that was born dead? What do you call the woman who telephones to you during business hours? What is a woman who wears dirty white gloves? What is a man who gives you advice “for your own good”? Well, behold a guide to help you;—read “Burgess Unabridged.” It is the dictionary of the Futurist language!
Yes, my modest “Unabridged” will “fill a long felt want.” It will solidify the chinks of conversation, express the inexpressible, make our English language ornamental, elegant, distinguished, accurate. Other dictionaries have recorded the words of yesterday, my lexicon will give the words of to-morrow. What matter if none of them is “derived from two Greek words”? My words will be imaginotions, penandinkumpoops, whimpusles, mere boojums rather than classic snarks, for I shall not construct “Portmanteau” words, like Lewis Carroll. I shall create them from instinctive, inarticulate emotions, hot from the depths of necessity. No “Onomatopœia,” either, for I do not hold with those who say that the origin of language is in the mere mimicry of natural sounds. No, like the intense poetic pre-Raphaelite female, who says and feels that her soul is violet, when I see a hand-embroidered necktie, I dive deep in my inner consciousness and bring up, writhing in my hand, the glad word, “Gorgule,” or “Golobrifaction” or “Diabob.”
For, as my friend, the Reverend Edward P. Foster, A.M., of Marietta, Ohio, has pointed out, in his great work on Ro, the a priori method is the only rational principle upon which to coin new words. Volapük, Esperanto, Idiom Neutral, Interlingua and Ido all have fallen by the wayside of this “philosophical” route. It is as futile to try to make the sound suggest the sense. For, investigation will show that so many senses are suggested that the word lacks definition. Not only does “stave” seem to imply a barrel, but music. And, if you take the sound alone, we have such different meanings as wright, right, write and rite, not to speak of exactly opposite interpretations in such word as “cleave.”