Unglish Dictionary
GIBBERISH (n) Words without meaning.UNGLISH (n) Meanings without words.
You know that thing that adults often do with young kids, where you make a goofy noise by strumming your finger across your lips? Makes a sound like “Bweebaweebaweebawubba?” Of course you know that thing, everyone knows it. So, why isn’t there a word for it?
(v) Strum your lips with your index finger while humming or vocalizing. Usually towards a young child.
I started asking that question—why isn’t there a word for this action, that feeling, some thing we all know—pretty frequently, and started recording those definitions as a twitter account called The Undictionary. Whereas Merriam and Webster collected words and transcribed their meanings, I began collecting meanings that had no words.
Eventually, I began writing stories that relied on these words, and looking for stories that would rely on words we didn’t yet have. What words would we have to invent once we mastered cloning, or the dark arts? I collected the best of these stories and definitions into a book, which you can download as a .pdf or buy a physical copy of.
(v) Behold, interpret, and thereby complete the synthesis required in the creation of art.
Although this is an artistic project, it’s been an incredible complement to my work as a writer and namer. In these jobs, I’m constantly searching for exactly the right word to convey a specific, subtle nuance. When I can’t find the right word for the concept, that’s a small failure for the job, but it becomes success for this project: one more entry in the Undictionary.
I’ve also created a horrible digital son of the Undictionary, called Unglitch, which is a Markov chain-based bot freestyling on my hefty corpus of Unglish words. These days, he tweets a lot more than I do.
Want to talk about gimmick Twitter accounts, the gap between concepts and words, or share your own Unglish concept?