When I was a kid, I loved playing with words. I would build chains between them, connected by anagrams, homophones, synonyms, etc. and often try to find meaning in the results. For instance, if you rearrange the word "chapel", you get the imaginary world "pleach", which sounds like "preach", especially if pronounced with an Asian sort of accent, and "preach" is something that could be done in a chapel. I got so good at anagrams from this, that now I can sometimes unscramble all six of the six-letter words in the Jumble (a scrambled word puzzle that appears in many US newspapers) in under a minute.
I also liked to incorporate other languages, which in my case were either Swiss German (because my mom speaks that) or later Spanish when I learned it in school. As an example, the word for "bone" in Swiss German sounds kind of like the word "knock" in English, and the word for "bean" sounds kind of like the English word "bone", so we have a chain knock --> bone --> bean that weaves back and forth between the languages.
I also had strong emotional connections to words, not in the sense of them reminding me of a concept with emotional significance, but the sounds of the words themselves. Sometimes they can create excitement, like in nca14's case, and I would find something like "caderci" like that too (and many Italian words--Italian sounds kind of like someone hopping and skipping along to me). Sometimes they can also convey anger/frustration, especially if they have several short vowels and hard consonants. Sometimes as a kid I would take names of things that I hated and try to anagram them to an imaginary word that sounded "angry".
I do this kind of wordplay less now as an adult--when I do it's less "cerebral" and more "from the gut", like a word to express my mood state at the time. Like lately I've had this near-constant tension in my brain due to health issues, and sometimes when I've been drinking I start to let go of it. One day I found that it felt relieving to say "JER-ky-jer-ky-jerky" under my breath over and over while exhaling, so I wrote it on the back of the page of math equations I was working on. Also one day I invented the word "Hägeflot", which has an "aggressive" ending of a short vowel and a T, but the beginning is very soft and drawn-out, and to me it expressed the feeling of being calm but on the verge of wanting to lash out in frustration. I imagine it being some kind of Scandinavian word.
26 Nov 2015, 5:31 am
)
