From Booksmart Studios, this is Lexicon Valley, a podcast about language.
I'm John McWhorter, and this is what we're going to talk about this time.
How do you make a new word?
This is something that I've been circling around in a lot of episodes of this show,
and it's a more interesting topic than it seems.
And it's not about the sort of things you might think.
was created or how language emerged forever, it's natural to wonder where words come from.
I was so touched, actually,
that somebody sent me a recording not too long ago of a little boy asking me,
you know, where do words come from?
And, you know, probably the first thing.
anybody would think of is that you imitate things.
You imagine that there were these languageless people and that they saw a dog and they came up with or something like that.
But you can't do that too often, or at least I certainly don't want to.
And so you're going to call it a rough rough or something like that.
And as we all know, that would get you about a millimeter into what a language is.
And so how else do you?
make a word.
And, you know, it's a tough one.
I worked for a company once that actually makes money coming up with names of products.