‘Hoy’ is fine, but what about common human situations? 

This year, the OED has borrowed from Malaysia, Norway, Japan, and the Philippines.
| Photo Credit: Getty Images

At a dinner once, I sat next to a person who turned to me with, “Can I have some more juice please?” when he meant gravy. Ignoring for the moment the kind of circles I move in, let’s focus on the more serious issue here. There is no word in the English language that describes such a person. Nor is there one for the way people stand when examining other people’s bookshelves. 

Or for the gesture when you see someone you think you know and raise your hand in greeting only to realise he is a stranger and so finish by brushing your hair instead. 

There are two ways of creating new words (the dictionary does not recognise the obvious word for this: vocabulate, dismissing it as slang). The first is promoted by OED (not Obsessive Educational Disorder, which many of us have, but Oxford English Dictionary). A word, usually untranslateable, is taken from another language – jugaad, chaai, or chuddies, for example – and co-opted into the King’s English. This year, the OED has borrowed from Malaysia, Norway, Japan, the Philippines. From the last-named comes ‘gigil’ (you can look it up). 

There is a second, more interesting way. Take an everyday situation or emotion that has no word to describe it, and then create one. 

But this method, made popular by Douglas Adams and John Lloyd, has not caught on. These two writers were on a holiday in Corfu while Adams was working on The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. They noticed there were “spare words which spend their time doing nothing but loafing about on signposts pointing at places”. 

Douglas explained their mission: “to get these words down off the signposts and into the mouths of babes and sucklings and so on, where they can start earning their keep in everyday conversation and make a more positive contribution to society.” They wrote a book about it: A Meaning of Liff: A Dictionary of Things That There Aren’t Any Words For Yet. Later they wrote A Deeper Meaning of Liff. 

The OED, let’s face it, doesn’t acknowledge or even recognise huge chunks of human experience. For example, what is the word for “That part of a raincoat which trails out of a car after you’ve closed the door on it.” Use Fladderbister, a word otherwise wasting its time loafing about on a signpost in Scotland, say the writers. And what about the bruise on the shoulder of someone who has been knighted unnecessarily often? 

Adams and Lloyd recognise human situations. Sometimes these are psychologically positive. Like the word for “standing in the kitchen wondering what you went in there for.” OK, you tell yourself, I am not the only one who feels foolish in such cases. Then there’s a word for “cautious movements towards the bathroom in the strange house in the dark.”  

It’s all very well for the OED to borrow “Yoh!” from South Africa and run with it, but what’s the word for “words that sound like they have a meaning, but don’t?”