singemonkey wrote
WantzChas wrote
Such an eloquent (did I use it right?) word, I looked it up on Wikipedia. I wish we had more of these words and sayings in Afrikaans.
In Afrikaans you have the advantage of being able to seize on anything and make it work. Orthodoxy isn't established in Afrikaans. A lot of Afrikaans writers from the early days had classical educations and probably invented similar stuff.
Interesting. That happened in English when it was a younger language. Shakespeare introduced a lot of new words - in the thousands.
Some of what Shakespeare did was to take words, or new uses for words, from common, one might say lower class speech and dignify them by including them in print and using them on the stage. I think that still happens now, and as somebody with no children I find myself occasionally bewildered by, to me, strange and arguably incorrect (from a pedantic POV) new uses of words eg "own" and "fail". Such things force the issue - the academics can say what they want and dig in their pedantic heels, but eventually those words, or those uses of those words, will prevail.
Such things do find their way into the "official" language. Each edition of the Oxford English Dictionary contains words not in the previous editions. Indeed there is a regular need for updates to the OED.
It must be the same for most languages.
