The other day when I was participating in a pleasant conversation among a group of friends, I did something that I repeat very often: I remained silent, I took some distance from the topics that were being discussed, and instead of focusing my attention on the substance of the I chatter, I distracted myself by mentally noting the forms, the words, the expressions and all the idiomatic details that adorned the discussion. In addition, among the many idioms and regionalisms, I perceived that the conversation was full of neologisms, those new or recently invented words.
It’s incredible how many neologisms we use to communicate. Neological terms—even though they may annoy conservatives and language puritans—enrich the language, even those carried over from English (anglicisms).
According to the Madrid Manifesto, a document signed by a group of linguists, lexicologists, translators and pedagogues from the main Spanish-speaking countries, “about three thousand new words need to be produced each year if we intend to have a living and modern language,” or simply to name with some rigor—without using the index finger—the objects of the world in which we are wandering around the universe.
I do not have the tools to evaluate the effectiveness of communication, or to do an analysis of values through words, or if they improve or worsen the style or the mutual understanding, what I intend is simply to rescue some of these terms that, of course, repeating them, they are part of the repertoire of a region, even if they have not been collected by any language academy.
It’s hard to track who invented new terms, so I want to believe it was a Piñata friend I heard for the first time, ever; and now, that word is so popular that other similar ones have already appeared, such as likewise, capably. In the entertaining gathering, there was no shortage of mockery, practical jokes and offensive comments that, as if they were anonymous internet users, trolled each other. And in the worst cases, the weakest target was ignored; or it was bypassed; that is, he skipped or ignored it in the conversation. To put it more clearly: he was loved.
The most technological ones confessed that they gugle and poke their young suitors and ban them or block them if they seem deceptive. Some call themselves jichis for clicking and logging into lurid pages without leaving traces. A large majority accepted that they found it difficult to take selfies and did not want to post their photos to avoid being called figuretis. More than one had already been hacked. Others admitted that they did not have the guts to tiktoke and preferred to facebook and like, although the chatting and chatting had them high and full of contentment; and fever, I must add.
When the topics began to become spicy, and these elderly men warned of the abilities of certain women who shugard them and could knock them down, the term nalguear appeared, which is not exactly slapping the buttocks. At the end of one of those customary picaresque — almost obscene — chatterboxes, someone, quite fichinga, with disbelief, let out a loud expression that caused a general laugh: naquewer!
The emergence of new words is a product of our need to fill reality with shared meanings—not always innocent—that try to name it, explain it, or communicate it to our interlocutors. Human beings play to stimulate our cognitive development and to deepen attachments and emotional experiences with our peers. Not all reality is language, but playing with language can be a way to intervene or create that reality.
