this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2024
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Lol, "not a real word"? They are right there in front of you in print with a definition and being used. That's literally all it takes to be a real word.
You, your grade school vocabulary, and your abridged dictionary aren't gatekeepers of the lexicon. Dictionaries describe the words people use. Dictionaries absolutely do not prescribe what are real words and which are made up, unless you're French (but even that is a lie). ALL WORDS ARE MADE UP.
Not a real word? Fucking hilarious.
Not eeeexactly, or perhaps, not only that, always. I'd say it takes several people using it. But this would be used by several people, and just us discussing and using the word in the given context already would have rendered enough use for it to be "a real word".
Easily coined latin words aside, how is "conflagration" a hard word? I'm pretty sure it's quite commonly used as well. Moreso in literature than in everyday speech, but still I hold it's a rather common word.
Around 1800-1850 "conflagration" was more used of a word than "hospitality" was around the 1970's.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=conflagration%2Clogoparalysis%2Chospitality&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3
"Logoparalysis" yields no results. So, regardless of how you define "real" words, the Ngram viewer definitely gives good info on their potential past usage
New words are still real words, even if you can't find it in an internet search. Don't lie to me and tell me you didn't immediately understand that word without needing the definition (because it's just such a damn near universal feeling, not every concept has a word YET in English, wild I know). That immediate reaction to a group of letters seems more real to me than your research skills. Words are more than artefacts to dig up and analyze. A fucking wild amount of our English language is informed by some playwright(s?) just making up words and phrases. Words are magic and this is a hill I will die on.
I didn't claim they weren't. Anyone can coin words, but whether they "become real" or not is just up to whether anyone else stars using them and or if they're made up of already known components which clearly indicate the meaning. Like for instance if I wrote random gibberish that I myself had assigned meaning to, you wouldn't be able to tell what it meant unless I used already existing words / conventions for coining new words.
That's the private language argument.
Obviously there are loads of words which get coined and instantly spread in usage, so the "age" of a word doesn't have meaning. The word having meaning is what matters.
If I wrote down lsdkbrjfufurbrnfnflslejje, is that a "real" word? Obviously it's just gibberish I wrote down, but what if I say it means a very specific thing. Does that then make it real? If people started using it, sure.
You very well know what people here mean by "real".
Use it. It's a word. Stop being a fucking troll.
Stop being willfully ignorant.
I think more to the point is that there's already a word with this meaning.
anomia
Fair point. Use it enough and it ends up in the dictionary anyway!
I think one really interesting case of this is "sonder", which has gained some popularity despite being explicitly invented a little over a decade ago.