On the Nature and Birth Pangs of Neologisms

“Aniquinically yours” she shouted triumphally, “that’s how it’s used, it’s a neologism”. It’s the adverbial form of the word “aniquinical” which is an adjective for the noun “aniquin”, although perhaps that’s a verb, but I’m pretty sure it’s a noun.

“Hmmm” Will replied skeptically. “Hhmmm” was not an acceptable word in Scrabble no matter how frequently he thought about using it. He was intrigued by the possibility of adding “h”s to increase the word score but, he abided by both the spirit and letter of the rules, no pun intended, and, getting back to Martina’s “aniquinically yours”, he responded on a more specific rather than reactive basis: “I’m pretty sure brand new neologisms designed to fit the board don’t count. Anyway, they’d have to mean something and what the hell does ‘Aniquin’ mean”?

He’d used the word “neologism” recently and, after he had proved its existence to Alyssa, the arbiter in their game, Martina had become intrigued by the possibilities it represented for her in the game. Now, she looked at him somewhat mysteriously, seductively, knowingly, as though she wasn’t bluffing and said: “everyone knows what that means, at least if they’ve had a modicum of education” (and she immediately thought: “modicum”, I’ll have to remember that). But she simply said, “If you’re challenging, just look it up”.

From across the room Alyssa said, “I think she meant ‘Aniconically’, which is a word.

“Yeah” Martina said, “that’s what I said!”

“But, … you spelled it wrong” Alyssa added, to Martina’s disappointment. “It’s spelled A-n-i-c-o-n-i-c-a-l-l-y”.

Will laughed and said, “So Martina, … what does ‘Aniconically’ mean anyway”? Smirking, he knew Martina had just made up a word. Martina was all too frequently creative in a deviously dishonest fashion. But she was also beautiful and charming and charismatic and was thus usually able to pull off whatever she wanted, especially with men to whom she was not related. But he was immune. Martina was his younger, very competitive sister and Will loved her just the way she was, especially since, over time, he’d finally learned how to read her.

Apparently, the three were not quite as alone as they thought they were. From what some might refer to as another dimension, perhaps one set in a sort of twilight that might have once been familiar to a certain Rod Serling, Aniquin apparently inchoately stillborn, looked on from the ether flowing from the board of the game on which Martina and Will were playing. All boards used in that game were sources of soul-like concepts which, from time to time, entered and possessed, not bodies, but the memeplexes we refer to as words. Aniquin wondered just what it was that it itself might someday mean and wondered what the hell ‘Aniconically’ meant. There were a google of other inchoate concepts sharing the etherous, otherworldly vapor seemingly surrounding Aniquin, all of them inchoate or stillborn, all of them waiting to be defined, all of whom looked on expectantly, wondering whether a new word was being born.

Apparently, on Instagram there existed a certain “Ani Quinn”, so the potential for a new word existed.

In the meantime, in the more tangible world with which most of us are familiar, Martina and Will had dashed for their shared official Second Revised Edition of the Random House Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary, a huge tome which sat pompously, almost smirking, in the middle of a bookcase made of castoff cement blocks and wooden planks on which diverse other books shared space with old wine bottles covered in the multicolored waxy residue of former candles as well as with the lonely, seemingly disappointed (or perhaps just disinterested) jade-colored bust of a well-known ancient Indian sage, one who too many people believed to have been born in a place referred to by its inhabitants as the Middle Kingdom (which was definitely different from Middle Earth).

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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2025; all rights reserved. Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, The Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.