"Go ahead, make up new words!" Review

In the video I watched titled "Go ahead, make up new words!", dictionary editor Erin McKean encourages everyone to use their creativity and think up new words. I was interested in this video because I've always been fascinated with how people came up with words in the first place. Erin says that we are born with an innate ability to use grammar in our language, and we unconsciously know when something sounds grammatically incorrect. This type of grammar is called descriptive grammar. Erin also describes another type of grammar called prescriptive grammar, which is the like the "traffic laws" that we are reminded to obey. Both of these types of grammar are important to follow when producing new words, because they must be understood by the intended audience. She describes several different strategies to create new words that can all be fairly simple to understand. The first way she describes is stealing words from other languages. Many words in English are already taken from other languages, such as this image that shows the process of how the word "orange" came to be:

The second method she describes is called compounding, which is basically just taking two English words and squishing them together to form a new word. An example she gives is "sandcastle", which is just two normal words ("sand" and "castle") that were moved next to each other to become just a single word. Another method that Erin describes is blending, and it is used by taking two English words and simply sort of melting them into each other. "Motel" and "brunch" are two examples of this, and in both words some letters were taken off of the original words in order to blend them together. Lastly, she describes how a new word can also be formed by taking a word and changing how it is used, called functional shift. The examples she gives are words like "commercial" and "green", that have changed their previous meanings.

Overall, the video was really entertaining to watch and I loved her enthusiasm about getting people to create new words. In my opinion, I think it is a great way for people to express their creativity and for us to have some fun while communicating. When groups use words that they have created, it brings them closer together and helps bring a sense of common understanding. There will never be a day when someone out there won't be thinking up new words, because our language is constantly evolving.