For example Pandora, the planet in the James Cameron movie Avatar , there the blue people speak a language called Na'vi, where trr'ong means dawn and frawzo is wonderful.
Paul Frommer, the American linguist invented the ET-speak from scratch, a language that sounded unearthly yet could still be uttered by humans. In short, an A to Z of nouce words.
Anthony Burgess did likewise in A Clockwork Orange, his fable of urban decay written in 1962. Alex and his fellow droogs (or mates) speak a slang called Nadsat, a hybrid of Russian and Cockney rhymes. Deng is money and bezoomy - mad.....neither word slated to survive beyond the novel's covers.
Because that's what happens. We see a nonce word we like and adopt it. We feed it milk (and oxygen) much like a stray cat.
This happened to the word quark. It was sitting unloved in James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake when a New York physicist called Murray Gell-Mann plucked it off the page and used quark to label one of the three hypothetical particles that form the basis of our Universe......Quite the honour, when you think about it!
As readers, we fall in love with inspired nonsense. We refer to runcible spoons (Edward Carroll) and mimsy wabes (Lewis Carroll), despite not grasping what the terms truly mean. From doh to supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, we collect nonce words like sea-shells. And the moment we pick one up, the term outlives its own transience to become a genuine part of speech.
"Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands, and goes to work"
~~ Carl Sandburg
This very friendly Magpie, that enjoyed sharing our apple in Palm Beach, Sydney, had a very quizzical look on her/his face as I was talking to him/her. Maybe I was talking Nonce! - 12 March 2011.
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