Simply for emotional release or the wicked fun of it, why not call an airport baggage claim area flooding with luggage at an ungodly hour a “baggatory”? Why not describe a miserable person who fakes bliss in carefully managed Facebook posts as “Facebook-happy”? And why not label an ex-boyfriend who haunts future relationships a “polterguy” (or, my own spur-of-the-moment coinage, a “poltergal” if the haunter is an ex-girlfriend instead)?
These are just three of the 200 of-the-moment words and phrases coined by American writer Liesl Schillinger for her newly released book
Wordbirds: An Irreverent Lexicon for the 21st Century (Simon & Schuster, 224 pages). Most of the entries in the collection are accompanied by whimsical drawings of birds by children’s book illustrator Elizabeth Zechel.
Whether you disdain neologisms of this sort or welcome them as logical offshoots of the vast new-word factory that the Internet has become,
Wordbirds should help make you much more expressive of your pet likes and dislikes, like referring to your missing an appointment as a “blunderschedule” and calling your boss an “impedimentor” for his or her stealth campaign to stall your career. Any which way, you can become a more skillful navigator of the fast-changing English of the 21st century.
Says Glenn C. Altschuler in his review of
Wordbirds for
Huffington Post Books: “(Schillinger’s) lexicon cleverly captures the new normal of the twenty-first century. Some of her neologisms, in fact, may well stand the test of time.”
Read Ian Crouch’s review of Liesl Schillinger’s Wordbirds in NewYorker.com now!Read excerpts from Liesl Schillinger’s Wordbirds on Facebook now! ABOUT THE AUTHORS:Liesl Schillinger has written for many publications, including
The New York Times,
The New Yorker,
The Washington Post, and
The New Republic. She is a regular contributor to
The New York Times Book Review and translates fiction from French and German.
Elizabeth Zechel is the illustrator and author of the children’s book
Is There a Mouse in the Baby’s Room? She has created illustrations for children’s books and cookbooks, as well as for a variety of magazine and literary journals.
