Often, I had come across an idea so frequently that I wished there was a word for it. I had soon realized that I can just put up my own signpost. I can create my own word for ideas. For me, this revelation was a sort of wizardry, being able to bridge lexical craters.
There are so many ideas that are hidden in plain sight that lack words. For example, stressors, in the sense that something causes harm, has no real opposite. There is no word in the English language that means things that are good for you. For me, these are benessors.
In fact, there is no word for ideas that don’t have a word. I call these unwords. Many have high unwordity, the obviousness of a concept but lacking a word. There are a few reasons for why many obvious concepts do not have words:
Obviousness: Like a background noise, we become used to its absence. Only when we search intentionally, we find that concepts lack words. Diminishing Returns: Often we have words that are “good enough”, such as destressor for stressor and there is simply not enough momentum to generate new vocabulary, which is intellectually demanding. Conformity: People simply don’t know that they can create new words.
Philosophical terrain, in particular, is linguistically barren, partly because it’s less explored and rough territory.
I think most people underestimate the power of lexical independence, or the ability to create their own sublanguage. The benefits of creating a word is that you can find the idea quicker and you can build on top of that idea. Often, there already exists terminology for a concept, but sometimes it’s so academically wieldy (e.g. “protective factors”) that it’s not used. Nimble, shorter words are more likely to be used.
But as with all magic, one has to be careful when creating words, as the act of doing so changes the nature of the terrain itself, creating a fault. For example, when psychology was forked from moral philosophy, it became a completely different field. Today, there is no word that captures the vast intersection of philosophy and psychology.
Moreover, having a specialized language can make it difficult to communicate with others, if you become deeply embedded. Mapping your internal language to lossy languages can also be frustrating once you’re used to this. For example, Buddhism has a very nuanced linguistic landscape around consciousness, but when mapped to English, several words are just reduced to “mindfulness”.
I have over a hundred words in my spellbook (and an unhappy spellchecker). These are a subset of words with very high unwordity:
(order alphabetically (?), add related words)
Qual: Something that shifts your consciousness (like psychedelics but broader, e.g. watching interstellar for the first time and the afterglow of inspiration) Pyrrhicism: idea that all good comes with bad, and vice versa (savants, tortured genius, poisoned gift, trojan horse, bittersweet) Carreyism: The idea that success does not bring happiness. Madruga: Liminal space between two local maxima (in reference to, e.g. dark night of the soul). It is a Spanish word for the quiet peace in the early morning (no English parallel). Benessors: The inverse of stressors (things that provide benefit). Unword: Idea for which there is no word.