Lucubrate
A reader writes: “Having a lifelong interest in words, like C.S.Lewis, I like to play with them sometimes, and see how many forms a word may take. Sometimes, a verb. Sometimes, an adjective. So I said your OoNs were lucubracious. Not lugubrious as you seem to think by your referring to possible misspelling. Now I am tired of playing with you. I still like to read what you write.”
American Heritage Dictionary, 3d ed, says, lucubrate means to write in a scholarly fashion; produce scholarship. From Indo-European leuk = Light, brightness.
Neat word. Never heard of it. Glad to discover it. Honored to be associated with it. Sometimes I feel like the lad in “Our Town” walking through the public library stacks, gawking up and saying in utter amazement, “Words. Millions of words.”
I like finding new words, not neologisms, but old words, words with cognate histories running out their ears that are new to me. Wikipedia says “neologisms are words and terms that have recently been coined, generally do not appear in any dictionary, but may be used widely or within certain communities. Protologisms are neologisms that have not yet caught on widely. (In fact, “protologism” is a neologism to be avoided.)” I’d just as soon avoid neologisms, for that matter, save for “certain communities” that are so avant-garde they must use them and depend on them and sometimes, I suspect, delight in them ever so much as finding what they had to get a new name for in the first place.
Gospeler John must surely have been delighted when he discovered Word while looking for a new synonym for Jesus. Little did he know how the notion would intrigue Bible scholars and theologians down through the years. Then later, the DNA guys also took the alphabet and grammar to parse what makes us tick and only needed four letters to pull it off. Indeed, they found the words that become us in a way that old John might be proud to know about. Maybe they aren’t exactly neologisms, but they do just fine until something better comes along.