I'm a lexicographer.
I make dictionaries.
And my job as a lexicographer
is to try to put all the words possible into the dictionary.
My job is not to decide what a word is, that is your job.
Everybody who speaks english
decides together what's a word and what's not a word.
Every language is just a group of people who agree to understand each other.
Now sometimes when people are trying to decide
if a word is good or bad,
they don't really have a good reason.
They say something like, "Because...grammar!"
(Laughter).
And I don't actually care about grammar too much.
don't tell anyone
But the word grammar--
actually, there are two kinds of grammar.
There's the kind of grammar that kind of lives inside your brain.
If you're a native speaker of a language or a good speaker of a language,
it's the unconscious rules that you follow when you speak that language.
And this is what you learn when you learn language as a child.
Here's an example:
this is a Wug.
Right, it's a Wug.
Now there is another one.
There are two of these.
there are two...
(audience): Wugs.
Exactly! You know how to make the plural of Wug.
That rule lives in your brain.
You never had to be taught this rule
You just understand it.
This is a experiment that was invented
by a professor at Boston College named Jean Berko Gleason
back in 1958.
So we've been talking about this for a long time
Now these kinds of natural rules that exist in your brain.
Theres aren't like traffic laws,
there more like laws of nature.
And nobody has to remind you to obey
a law of nature, right?
When you leave the house in the morning,
your mom doesn't say,
"Hey honey, it's going to be cold.
Take a hoodie, don't forget to obey the law of gravity!"
Nobody says this.
(Laughter).
Now there are other rules
that are more about manners than they are about nature.
So you can think of like a word like a hat.
Once you know how hats work
nobody has to tell you, "Don't wear hats on your feet."
What they have to tell you is, "can you wear hats inside?
Who gets to wear a hat?
what are the kinds of hats you get to wear?"
Those are more of the second kind of grammar
that linguists often call usage as opposed to grammar.
Now, sometimes people use this kind of rules-based grammar
to discourage people from making up words.
And I think that is, well, stupid.
So, for example, people are always telling you,
"Be creative, make music do art, invent things,
science and technology."
But when it comes to words, they're like,
"Don't! No. Creativity stops right here,
whipper-snappers. Give it a rest."
(Laughter).
But that makes no sense to me.
Words are great.
We should have more of them.
I want you to make as many new words as possible
and I'm going to tell you six ways
that you can use to make new words.
The first way is the simplest way:
basically, steal them from other languages.
(Laughter).
Linguists call this borrowing,
but we never give the words back
so I'm just going to be honest and call it stealing.
We usually take words for things that we like,
like delicious food.
We took "cumquat" from Chinese.
We took "caramel" from French.
We also take words for cool things, like "ninja", right?
We took that from Japanese,
which is kind of a cool trick cause ninjas are hard to steal from.
(Laughter).
So another way that you can make
words in English is by squishing two other English words together.
It's called compounding.
Words in English are like legos,
if you use enough force,
you can put any two of them together.
We do this all the time in English:
words like "heartbroken", "bookworm", "sandcastle"
-- all are compounds.
So go ahead and make words
like "duckface", just don't make duckface.
(Laughter).
Another way you can make words in English
is kind of like compounding,
but instead you use so much force
when you squish the words together that some parts fall off.
So these are blend words,
Like "Brunch" is a blend of "breakfast and lunch".
"Motel" is a blend of "motor" and "hotel".
Who here knew that "motel" was a blend word?
Yeah, that word is like so old in English that lots of people
don't know that there are parts missing.
"Edutainment" is a blend word of "education" and "entertainment".
And of course "electrocute" is a blend of "electric" and "execute".
You can also make words by changing how they operate.
This is called functional shift.
You take one word that act as one part of speech
and you change it into another part of speech.
Okay, who here knew that "friend"
hasn't always been a verb?
"Friend" used to be noun and then we verbed it.
Almost any word in English can be verbed.
You can also take adjectives and make them into nouns.
"Commercial" use to be an adjective adjective and now it's a noun.
And of course, you can "green" things.
Another way to make words in English is back-formation.
You can take a word and squish it down a little bit.
So for example, we had the word "editor" before we had the word "edit".
"Edit" was formed from "editor".
Sometimes back-formations sound a little silly:
bulldozers bulldoze,
butlers butle
and burglers burgle
(Laughter).
Another way to make words in English
is to take the first letters of something
and squish them together.
So National Aeronautics and Space Administration
becomes NASA.
And of course you can do this with anything--OMG!
So it doesn't matter how silly the words are.
They can be really good words of English.
"Absquatulate" is a perfectly good word of English
"Mugwump" is a perfectly good word of English.
Words don't have to sound normal.
They can sound really silly.
Why should you make words?
You should make words because every word
is a chance to express your idea
and get your meaning across.
And new words grab people's attention.
They get people to focus on what you're saying
and that gives you a better chance to get your meaning across.
A lot of people on the stage have said,
"In the future, you can do this,
you can help with this, you can help us explore,
you can help us invent."
You can make a new word now.
English has no age limit.
Go ahead, start making words today.
Send them to me,
and I'll put them in my online dictionary word-bank.
Thank you so much
(Applause).