Word creation, Shakespeare style.

Most of you will know Shakespeare for his brilliant plays and sonnets. Perhaps you’ve never read the plays, but odds on you’ve seen at least one of them performed or at the movies. At the very least, we’ve all seen Baz Luhrmann's Romeo and Juliet, right? Fish tank scene. Leonardo DiCaprio. On it.

What many people don’t know about Shakespeare is that he is responsible for creating 1700 new words, including ‘loneliness’.

This to me is very impressive indeed, and also a little staggering – its hard to conceive being lonely without having a word for it. Yet there are still so many feelings out there that everyone experiences that we have no words for.

For example, the feeling you get when you are picked out of your class to answer a question and you haven’t done the reading and hence have no idea. You go a little red, your stomach starts to churn, and your brain goes into overload trying to come up with something that will pass as an answer. It’s not panic, but it’s close – more than uncomfortable, and different to stress. Many people describe the feeling as drawing a blank, or ‘having a recall problem’, or being ‘put on the spot’, but none of these really describe that first moment when you realise that you have been picked out from the crowd.

Think being able to describe it would help? Probably not much. But it would at least give you something to say while you were racking your brain for the answer.

That's where I come in.

In a Welcome to the Antipodes exclusive, I have created for your own usage a brand new word -

Scholanic / skol – an – ick

A scholarly fear or sudden panic.

Derivative : A combination of the words panic and school - [From French panique, terrified, from Latin schola] into a whole new super word that has a myriad of uses.

You don’t know the answer to the question your lecturer has just asked you. You mention off hand that you’ve read a difficult novel just to sound smart, and someone turns around and wants to discuss Joyce’s use of symbolism in the latter chapters of Ulysses. You flip over an exam paper and realise you studied the wrong topic.

And all of a sudden, you feel a little scholaniced.

Edited: It'd be embarrassing to write half of the penultimate sentence twice, wouldn't it? Lucky none of you noticed.

Oh.

I feel that admission is worth leaving, simply because I get to use the word "penultimate*", one of my favourite words, and one that is very difficult for me to throw around in conversation.

* Means "second to last".