Why I Am a Kloon

I think inventing new words should be an Olympic sport. It's a really fun thing to do if you're bored. I do it all the time. I believe words are the one thing that you can never have too much of. (Credit and Alicia Silverstone are the other two.) In fact, I've even coined a new word for this very activity -- "choogling". (No connection with "googling".)

Choogle, v : To invent a new word or term or give a new meaning to a word or term that already exists.

As mentioned in the definition above, there are two forms of choogling. You can either create a completely new word of your own, as "choogle" itself is a good example of, or you can use a word that already exists in the language, but giving it a new meaning. For example, I could tell you to sod off by saying, "Iron the dog!"

My new ambition in life is for someone studying the etymology of a term three centuries from now, to trace it back to a certain Arnold D'Souza who first used it sometime in the early 21st century. (Let's call people with stupid ambitions "kloons".)

One of the reasons why I like making up new words is because I suffer from a rather insufficiently stocked vocabulary. I'm often thinking about a situation or a concept and I just won't be able to think of a word to describe it. Now I can just choogle my way out of such situations. (I call people with insufficiently stocked vocabularies "bums".)

Of course this doesn't always help me practically. I often find myself in conversations that go something like the following:

Me: Say, you know that thing? The -- ummm -- wishet? Did you, ummm, flumengate the wishet?
Kim: Ummm... Come again?
Me: The wishet! I keegled Tom and told him to woozle you about it. Ummm.. at least I think I did.
Kim: Ummm... What the dickens are you talking about?
Me: (In frustration) Iron the dog!

I'll call conversations with an inordinately large count of "ummm"s in them "boopers". As you can see the above booper got us nowhere, except that Kim's dog probably had a wrinkleless fur coat the next day. Boopers are not good.

You may also have noticed that a lot of my terms contain a double "o" in them. I've grown partial to the double "o" construct. I leave it to you to create a term to describe such words.

What new words of your own have you come up with?