Call it a cliché makeover.

Warren Buffett, chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, breathes new life into old, worn-out phrases in a letter to shareholders. His secret: extending the original metaphor the cliché was based on:

By extending the cliché sleep easy at night with mattress, Buffett gives this tired phrase new life. (Back story: Berkshire reinsured Equitas so its “names,” or underwriters, don’t have to worry about huge claims bankrupting the firm and themselves):

Reinvent a cliche.

A.G. Edwards uses this technique in its “nest egg” ad series. The investment firm reinvents one of my least-favorite clichés by making it visual and extending it as far as it can go. One result: a Silver Anvil award.

Instead of eliminating your next cliché, see if you can take it further. By doing so, you might just resurrect it.

Refresh a cliche.

You might also try refreshing a cliche. To refresh a cliche:

1. Circle all the clichés in your message
2. Refresh them by writing a new ending

Get inspiration from this list. Story goes that it was created when a first-grade teacher collected clichés and asked her students to come up with new endings for tired cliches.

You don’t have to be George Carlin to pull this off. Hey! If a group of first-graders can do it, imagine how engaging your “new clichés” will be.

More ways to revive a cliché

In a Newsweek article about new TV shows, Devin Gordon writes:

It’s dangerous to make broad generalizations about TV versus film without sounding like you’re comparing apples and tubas, but let’s do it anyway.

This technique is called “Twist a cliche.” To do that, sub out a traditional word in the cliché for a new one.

Instead of dog tired, for instance, ask, “Who else is really tired? New mothers? People working double shifts? Hospital interns?”

Here are four more ways to breathe new life into old, worn-out phrases:

1. Reverse a cliché. Replace a key word in the cliché with one that means the opposite. One character on “The Closer,” for instance, “compliments” another on a eulogy: “There wasn’t a wet eye in the house.”
2. Combine clichés. Put two clichés together to create a fresh phrase. Lyrics to one “Flight of the Conchords” song, for instance, go, “The fork in the road cuts like a knife.”
3. Flip a cliché. RevUpReadership.com member Connie Gotsch writes: “How about saying to someone, ‘With enemies like you who needs friends?’ I did that and the person did a double take and then fell over laughing.”
4. Twist a cliche. Go through the letters of the alphabet to change the word. Or rearrange the letters in the word. Or add an incorrect word or phrase. Or substitute a double-entendre for a common word.

Resources for reinventing cliches

Want to flip or reinvent a phrase? Try these resources:

Expand your topic words

• OneLook Reverse Dictionary: Know the definition, but not the word? Need to generate a list of words in a category? Just looking for some help with The New York Times’ crossword puzzle? Look no further.
• RhymeZone: Find words that rhyme, synonyms or antonyms, related words and more. Or get your creative juices flowing by skimming words coined by Shakespeare, Mother Goose lyrics, useful quotations and other inspiring features.
• Visual Thesaurus: This thesaurus presents search results as a series of three-dimensional maps of connotative associations.

Find phrases to twist

• Amazon’s Hot New Releases: Bestselling new and future releases on Amazon.com, updated hourly. Twist these top-of-mind titles.
• Cliché Finder: Type in your key words and get familiar phrases to twist.
• Internet Movie Database: Find movie titles to twist.
• Phrase Thesaurus: Simply plug in a key word from your article, and Phrase Thesaurus lists conventional phrases for you to twist.
• Lyrics: Get lyrics for twisting.

Find quotes to twist

• BrainyQuote: Find 45,000 famous quotes by 5,000 authors, from Aristotle to Zappa.
• Fagan Finder’s Quotations and Proverbs Search: Search 50 quote sites — from the biggies, like Bartleby, to lesser-known ones, such as Mathematical Quotations Server and Psycho Proverb Zone. If you can’t find it here, it’s hard to imagine that you can find it anywhere.
• The Quote Verifier: Who Said What, Where and When: Confirm that you’ve got the right quote by the right source

The post How to play with words in writing appeared first on Wylie Communications, Inc..

Long ago, on an episode of “The Colbert Report,” Stephen Colbert compared:

Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and the Toyota Camry

He was using a wordplay technique called “twist a list.” Think of it as the “One of these things is not like the others” approach.

You can use it, too.

• Set up your list with two or more serious items that conceptually go together: Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism, for instance.
• Add a funny final item that’s not like the others: the Toyota Camry, in this case.

Comedians twist a list to add humor to their routines. Now you can use this approach in your own copy.

List twisting in action

Professional speaker Mary Fisher uses this approach in her keynote, “Humor in the Workplace. She asked the audience to:

Please raise your hand if you feel you have a touch of Humor Deficit Disorder.

Raise your hand if you have to live with someone who has Humor Deficit Disorder.

Raise your hand if you have to work with someone who has Humor Deficit Disorder.

Raise your hand if you have to work with someone who has it, but you can’t raise your hand because he’s sitting next to you now.

In “Kinky Boots,” Lola calls out to:

Ladies and gentlemen … and those who have yet to make up your minds.”

David Dixon won Salon’s Haiku Error Messages challenge with this verse:

Three things are certain:
Death, taxes, and lost data.
Guess which has occurred.

In Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn paints a quick snapshot of a character with this twisted list:

Her bookshelves are stocked with coffee-table crap: The Irish in America. Mizzou Football: A History in Pictures. We Remember 9/11. Something Dumb with Kittens.

Scott Beckett, copy editor for the Corpus Christi Caller-Times, twisted this list to earn an American Copy Editors Society (ACES) headline contest award:

Going once, going twice, going to be confused

Critics of state’s foreclosure auction process call for more accountability, while lenders say the system protects homebuyers

Twist a familiar list.

You can also twist a familiar list for a funny result. William Shakespeare, for instance, wrote:

Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.

Now twist it: “Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some ….” How would you finish that sentence?

How to play with words

Twisting a list is one of a wide variety of word games you can play to turn plain words and phrases into double entendres, puns and other plays on words. How can you make your messages more engaging by playing with your words?

The post How to play with words appeared first on Wylie Communications, Inc..

When the Federal Trade Commission needed to explain why the agency has decided not to develop a do-not-spam registry — officials feared that spammers would target people on the list — a spokesperson said:

“You’ll be spammed if we do — and spammed if we don’t.”

How can you craft such a good pun or play on words? One approach is to list, rhyme and twist. Here’s how:

1. List.

Write down the key or topic words from your article.

Then expand your list. The more words, the better. Try synonyms, antonyms and different forms of your keyword — spam, spams, spammed and spamming, for instance.

Visual Thesaurus and OneLook Reverse Dictionary are great tools for adding words to your list.

2. Rhyme.

Use rhyming dictionaries to find words that sound similar to your keywords. My favorite is RhymeZone.

Keep looking. RhymeZone doesn’t recognize “spammed.” But it did send me to OneLook Dictionary Search for words ending in “ammed.” (Input “*ammed.”)

I searched for one of them — slammed — back at RhymeZone, which gave me this list: crammed, dammed, damned, jammed, rammed, scammed.

Next, find phrases that include those rhyming words at Phrase Thesaurus or ClichéSite.com. In fact, I found another starting point for the FTC sound bite by doing this research:

Publish and be damned.

3. Twist.

Now substitute your key word for the rhyming word. Make it:

Publish and be spammed.

List, rhyme and twist in action.

This approach can result in headlines covering …

… The Chicago’s Ritz-Carlton ranking best hotel in the United States in a reader poll:

How the Ritz Was One

… A couple of new movie theaters being built in the same neighborhood:

Coming soon: Two theaters near you

… Turbulent Spanish elections:

New Reign in Spain

… A consultant hiring a personal trainer after he hit a plateau working out on his own:

My muscles, so to speak, had grown accustomed to the pace.

… A blistering (and bearish) week in August:

It’s Not the Heat, It’s the Economy

The launch of Playboy.com:

Silly Rabbit, These Clicks Aren’t For Kids

Choose fluent words.

The best words to play with are fluent words — that is, they’re short (one syllable’s best), sweet and easy to pronounce.

That’s why the first step in wordplay is to expand your word list by finding related words. For a story on how to manage your inheritance without making common missteps, for instance, the word in my head was “inherit” — not very fluent. So I ran it through OneLook Reverse Dictionary and landed on the word “heir.”

Now, “heir” may be one of the best words to play with in the English language. That’s because “heir”:

• Is a homophone that sounds like err and air. That makes it easy to sub a soundalike, like:

Err apparent

• Looks as if it sounds like hair, which makes it easy to list and twist:

Bad hair day

• Rhymes with dozens of words, including care, dare, fair, pair, prayer, rare, scare, share and their — all good candidates for listing, rhyming and twisting.
• Looks as if it could be pronounced here, which allows more listing and twisting:

Heir today, gone tomorrow

• Is short, sweet and easy to pronounce.

Don’t wait for the muse.

Some lucky communicators are natural-born phrase twisters. I have to substitute systems and processes for talent.

If you’re like me, list, rhyme and twist key words in your next story for a sassy sound bite or surprising headline.

The post How to write puns: List, rhyme and twist appeared first on Wylie Communications, Inc..

Some people are natural-born phrase twisters. The rest of us will likely need some help.

Want to write twists of phrase that are as clever as puns in literature? Can you write the corporate equivalent of Oscar Wilde’s play, “The Importance of Being Earnest”? Could you pull off a compound pun, twist a list, or list, rhyme and twist?

Here’s a process for hunting down the muse:

1. Identify your topic word.

What’s the key word in your story?

2. Find related words.

Create a list of synonyms, antonyms, rhyming words, homophones and other related words. Find words and phrases that sound similar to your topic word. These tools should get you started:

• Visual Thesaurus. This thesaurus presents search results as a series of three-dimensional maps of connotative associations.
• OneLook Reverse Dictionary. It’s like a thesaurus on steroids.
• Google “homophone for (your topic word).” Find words that sound like your key words so you can sub a soundalike.

The best words to play with are fluent words — that is, they’re short (one syllable’s best), sweet and easy to pronounce. “World,” for instance, is going to give you a lot more options for wordplay than “international.”

Finding the right word is the first step toward better wordplay. These tools can help you get there faster.

Don’t try to keep these words in your head. It’s easier to play with your words if you get them down on paper or on the screen.

3. Find familiar phrases to twist.

There are lots of great tools out there to make this easy. Among them:

• Phrase Thesaurus. This searchable database of the largest collection of English-language phrases and sayings available on the web is like an online sound bite generator.
• Internet Movie Database. Find movie titles to twist.
• Lyrics.com. Find song titles and lyrics to twist.

4. Play twister.

Take your list of phrases and start substituting words.

Sam Horn, author of POP! The Art and Science of Creating the Next New Thing, is the goddess of developing creative book titles. She uses these techniques to come up with twists of phrase:

• Reverse phrases.
• Replace words.
• Try different spellings.
• Substitute your key word for words that start with the same letter. (“Movers and shakers,” for instance, could become “mothers and shakers.”)

Here’s how it works …

.. in an IABC Southern Region Silver Quill call for entries:

Nothing Entered. Nothing Gained.

.. on a Men’s Health headline about how chocolate may be even more healthy than previously thought:

Avoid Death, Buy Chocolate

… atop a business-to-business review of a marketing book:

Life’s a pitch … and then you buy

Avoid stupid word tricks.

The Poynter Institute’s Roy Peter Clark once asked, “What value is there in a story of a renegade rooster that falls back on “foul play,” or, even worse, ‘fowl play’?”

Wordplay is great. Unless it’s not. Then it can be awful.

How can you create wordplay that’s witty, and not a joke?

• Have a process. Don’t just sit waiting for inspiration to slap you across the face.
• Go beyond the surface of the story. Be specific. Get past the topic to the angle. Your phrases for “money” are going to be a lot shallower than those for “managing your unexpected inheritance.”
• Throw away your first three ideas. Push past “Making ‘cents’ of your medications” to something more sophisticated and original. If you spend no more than 45 seconds coming up with a concept, is it any wonder that it’s a groaner?
• Remember, a little alliteration goes a long way.
• Don’t twist overused phrases.

When Molly Ivins wrote a piece about a chicken-killing festival, she didn’t fall back on:

Fowl play

Instead of the late, great columnist famously described the event as a:

Gang pluck

The post How to write a pun appeared first on Wylie Communications, Inc..

When Perceptive Software needed to fill 130 positions — more than one-third of its existing workforce — in just three months, a contradiction in terms was just what the company needed.

Perceptive communicators created a campaign to show that the company — a midsized document management software engineering firm based in Shawnee, Kansas — was hip, hiring and a great place to work.

Shawnee and … hip? For a woman who was raised in this Kansas City suburb, that sounds like an oxymoron. But despite its location, Perceptive is cool, what with its cutting-edge software, Wii “decompression” chambers, on-site dodgeball court and slide from the second to the first floor.

That’s a paradox. So paradox, or oxymoron, became the theme for Perceptive’s campaign.

Contradiction in terms

Oxymoron is a figure of speech that combines two normally contradictory terms — think “deafening silence,” “wise fool” or “cruel kindness.”

The best oxymorons emphasize contrasts, incongruities or the complex nature of reality. “Oxymoron” is Greek for “sharply dull,” so the word is itself an oxymoron.

For nearly 40 years, researchers have been showing that paradoxes in advertising:

• Draw attention to a message and may enhance persuasion
• Give readers a sense of accomplishment and are thus intrinsically rewarding and pleasurable
• Seem “surprisingly true” — and might astonish people into changing their attitudes and beliefs

The Perceptive communicators built their campaign around oxymorons — from the company’s career site URL to its billboards, radio spots and T-shirts. Here’s a sampling of the copy:

The Perceptive communicators were using one of Roy Peter Clark’s top 50 writing tips: Use modifiers to change the meaning of the word, not to intensify it.

“‘Killing Me Softly’? Good adverb,” The Poynter Institute senior scholar writes in Writing Tools. “‘Killing Me Fiercely’? Bad adverb.”

How to write an oxymoron

You can use this approach, too, for your own copy, concept or campaign:

• Determine your key word or phrase. Let’s call it “prima donna.”
• Find contradictory modifiers or verbs via Visual Thesaurus (via RevUpReadership.com), OneLook Reverse Dictionary or your own beautiful brain. “Timid,” maybe.
• Put them together (timid prima donna) and — voila! — you’re off.

The results

It’s one thing to be creative, of course, and another to generate serious business results. Among its successes, Perceptive’s campaign:

• Drew 3,055 résumés via the website — an increase of 408% over the same period the previous year
• Filled 135 positions — five more than the original goal. That was three more during the four-month campaign than the company had filled during the 12 months before the campaign
• Came in at 8% under budget
• Earned lots of buzz from the media, adoration from Perceptive executives and a PRISM award from Kansas City/PRSA

Bottom-line creative. There’s nothing oxymoronic about that.

___

Sources: Jason Stella and Stewart Adam, “Tropes in Advertising: A Web-based Empirical Study,” Southern Cross University, 2005

“Oxymoron,” Wikipedia

The post Why do we use oxymorons? appeared first on Wylie Communications, Inc..

HITS HAPPEN, blares a car insurance company promoting its “accident forgiveness insurance.”

Change a letter, change a word.

How can you add, subtract, move or change letters or syllables to make your copy more creative via wordplay?

1. Add or subtract a syllable.

Smirch was a verb, reports Barbara Wallraff, author of Word Fugitives: In Pursuit of Wanted Words, before William Shakespeare added the prefix be- to it. And impediment was in use for at least 200 years before Shakespeare came up with impede.

How can you add or subtract a syllable to create a new word? Here are four approaches to try:

2. Change a letter.

The Washington Post’s Style Invitational might invite readers to “take any word, add, subtract or alter a single letter, and redefine the word.” Recent responses include:

• Diddleman, a person who adds nothing but time to an effort
• Nominatrix, a spike-heeled woman who controls the selection of candidates for party whip
• Compenisate, to buy a red Porsche for reasons you don’t quite understand

3. Change a letter, then redefine.

The Post also invites readers to add, subtract or change one letter in a word and supply a new definition. Among the top entries:

• Dopeler effect: the tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly
• Giraffiti: vandalism spray-painted very high
• Intaxication: euphoria at getting a refund from the IRS, which lasts until you realize it was your money to start with
• Reintarnation: coming back to life as a hillbilly
• Sarchasm: the gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the reader who doesn’t get it

4. Oui! Change a letter in a foreign word, then redefine.

New York Magazine invited readers to change a single letter in a foreign phrase, then provide a definition. Some of the best new phrases:

• Cogito, eggo sum: I think, therefore I am a waffle.
• Harlez-vous Francais? Can you drive a French motorcycle?
• Mazel ton: tons of good luck
• Quip pro quo: a fast retort
• Veni, vidi, vice: I came, I saw, I partied.

5. Create definitions for groups of things.

In An Exaltation of Larks, James Lipton, now better known as the host of Inside the Actors Studio on Bravo, publishes “venerable terms of venery,” or collective nouns to define a group of objects, such as a pride of lions.

Among the terms Lipton has published:

• a phalanx of flashers (Kurt Vonnegut)
• a mews of cathouses (Neil Simon)
• an om of Buddhists (George Plimpton)

What’s the term of venery for a group of vice presidents? A meeting of your top clients? A conference of communicators?

The post How do you coin a word? appeared first on Wylie Communications, Inc..

Call it Curbside Haiku.

When the New York City Department of Transportation needed new street safety signs, the DOT posted 144 signs with Japanese haiku, the three-line poem with a syllable count of 17.

One example:

Cyclist writes screenplay
Plot features bike lane drama
How pedestrian

And:

Aggressive driver.
Aggressive pedestrian.
Two crash test dummies.

And:

Imagine a world
Where your every move matters.
Welcome to that world.

Why use the traditional Japanese poetry form of 5-7-5 syllables for safety messages?

“Poetry has a lot of power,” Morse tells NPR’s Scott Simon. “If you say to people: ‘Walk.’ ‘Don’t walk.’ Or, ‘Look both ways.’ If you can tweak it just a bit — and poetry does that — the device gives these simple words power.”

Haiku also cuts through the clutter of competing messages.

“There’s a lot of visual clutter … all around us,” Morse says. “So the idea is to bring something to the streetscape that might catch someone’s eye.”

How can you communicate with haiku? Use the traditional Japanese poetic form to:

1. Announce news.

Japanese poets usually use this form of poetry to write about the natural world. But you can use haiku’s syllable structure to write about almost any topic.

Jonathan Schwartz, chief executive of Sun Microsystems, for instance, announced his resignation on Twitter with a traditional haiku:

Financial crisis
stalled too many customers.
CEO no more.

Get more inspiration for haiku news announcements.

2. Present tips.

Entergy’s Chris Smith offers haiku editing advice:

Readers stayed away.
Did your headline have a verb?
I didn’t think so.

Heather Lloyd Martin of SuccessWorks offers these SEO copywriting tips in haiku:

Don’t write for engines.
Google doesn’t buy from you.
But your prospects do.

And Elaine G. Helms, director of marketing for Jenkins•Peer Architects, shares this suggestion:

Writing, like sushi,
should be thoughtfully formed and
easy to consume.

3. Write blog posts.

Find inspiration at The Day-to-Day Haiku Project and others.

4. Update your ‘404: File not found’ messages.

David Dixon won Salon’s Haiku Error Messages challenge with this verse:

Three things are certain:
Death, taxes, and lost data.
Guess which has occurred.

And The Motley Fool’s error messages are always entertaining:

You step in the stream,
but the water has moved on.
This page is not here.

Server is willing
Alas, the file is crafty
It cannot be found.

5. Develop PR pitches.

Jennifer Boulden, PR pro at Fort Smith, Arkansas, Convention & Visitors Bureau, pitches:

Fort Smith, Arkansas:
Outlaws, hangings, prostitutes.
Bad guys, great stories.

How to write a haiku poem

To write a haiku, just count the number of syllables. You’re looking for five in the first line, seven in the second and five in the final. Here’s a writing practice where cutting a word can make all of the difference.

“In haiku the half is greater than the whole,” writes Robert Spiess, American haiku poet. “The haiku’s achievement is in what it omits.”

Haiku gets attention

Haiku engages audiences. The NYC DOT’s haiku poems get plenty of news coverage. And that coverage really engaged readers.

“One of the joys of doing this sort of thing is how many people have responded to it with their own haiku,” Morse says. “There’s just a plethora of haiku coming out. It’s so exciting.”

Here are some of the responses to the NYC DOT’s haiku poems:

Gothamist writes:

DOT uses
Money from drunk driver fines
To buy new haikus!

NPR listeners talk back:

Only in New York —
Poetic signs in motion.
Slow down; look both ways.

And The Week’s readers respond:

While reading the sign,
I walked into the post. Ow.
Irony flattens.

The post How to write a haiku appeared first on Wylie Communications, Inc..

One of the most creative examples of wordplay I’ve ever seen came straight from some good dictionary research. The story: “The Big No,” Steven Wright’s Esquire piece about the suicide of Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain.

Here’s the kicker:

The history of ideas is reflected in language. So if you aim to explain ideas, one way is to explain language. That’s why etymology — the study of word history* — is such an effective form of wordplay. Looking into the meanings behind and origins of your key words can give your copy depth and context.

How to write with etymology

In Demon in the Freezer, Richard Preston uses etymology to show the fascinating origins of the word vaccination:

Siddhartha Mukherjee packs The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer with etymological explanations like this one.

The late, great restaurant reviewer Charles Ferruzza described menu items so well that you felt like licking the newsprint. In one column, Ferruzza used etymological research to explain the origins of one entrée’s name:

And Andrew Graham-Dixon used etymology to add additional layers of meaning and context to these three passages from Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane:

How to find the etymology of a word

To perform an etymological study:

1. Research etymological dictionaries.

Here are some to try:

• LibrarySpot Etymology Dictionaries
• Etymologically Speaking
• Google’s “etymology” search results
• Any dictionary of the English language

Or just Google “etymology of [your keyword].”

2. Look up the root words of your topic.

Explore the history and evolution of your keywords. Get the true sense of how these words were born and evolved over time.

3. Work with those words.

Use what you’ve learned to develop more sophisticated wordplay.

As long as you promise to avoid the overused “Webster’s defines quality as yadda, yadda, yadda …,” you can find some terrific material through etymological research.

How can you use etymological research to add layers of context and meaning to your topic?

___

* You may find word origins and development from:

• Latin and French words and other romance languages
• Modern English or Middle English words
• High German and other Germanic languages
• Indo-European languages
• Modern French words and phrases

Studying a word’s etymology is like a trip around the world via the Oxford English dictionary.

The post How to find the etymology of a word appeared first on Wylie Communications, Inc..

First there was FUBAR: F***ed Up Beyond All Recognition. Now, thanks to the Urban Dictionary, we also have PHOBAR: PHOtoshopped Beyond All Recognition. (Like this.)

I know; I know: Acronyms can make your copy harder to read. After all, it’s hard for readers to follow your train of thought when they’re drowning in alphabet soup.

But acronyms can also make your copy easier to read and remember, writes Jack Napoli, if you use them to group your key ideas “into nuggets of distinction.”

‘Nuggets of distinction’

MARC, for instance, is easier to remember than Mid-America Regional Council. It’s also easier to remember than an acronym that doesn’t spell something out — MRC, for instance, for Midwestern Regional Council.

Acronyms also help readers remember lists. Richard Saul Wurman, for instance, uses the acronym LATCH to outline five ways to organize copy:

• Location
• Alphabet
• Time
• Category
• Hierarchy

I recently made a mnemonic for the six types of concrete detail that grab attention and communicate your key ideas. The resulting acronym — FEASTS for the senses:

• Fun facts, juicy details
• Examples, for instances
• Analogies
• Startling statistics
• Testimonials
• Stories

How to create an acronym

Here’s how I did it … and how you can do it, too:

• List the words you want to include. You might need to find potential substitutes.
• Type the first letter of each word into the Online Anagram Server box.
• Click “get anagrams.”

Test your acronym.

To make sure your mnemonic makes your message easier to understand, Napoli suggests keeping your acronyms:

• Short: three to six characters long
• Meaningful: Make sure the acronym complements the subject matter.
• Repeatable: easy to say and remember

Napoli asks: “Can the audience recall your message in 2 minutes, 2 hours, 2 days, 2 weeks or 2 martinis later?”

The post Help people remember with acronyms appeared first on Wylie Communications, Inc..

Tracy Ousdahl and Paul Pinney have traveled the globe. But sometimes, instead of venturing out to a cool destination, they use their time off to visit their families.

Don’t call that a vacation, though. To Tracy and Paul, that’s a famcation.

Half-and-half words like famcation — linguists call these portmanteaus — not only grab readers’ attention. They also move further and faster on social media. In fact, research by HubSpot’s Dan Zarrella shows that tweets containing novel words tend to get retweeted more often than those that don’t.

Smash words together like Shakespeare.

Smirch was a verb, writes Barbara Wallraff, author of Word Fugitives: In Pursuit of Wanted Words, before Shakespeare added the prefix be- to it. And impediment was in use for at least 200 years before Shakespeare came up with impede. The bard also created the words madcap, ladybug, eyesore and eyeball, among many others.

Among the first people to “neologize publicly on purpose,” Wallraff writes, were English writers Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear. Carroll, author of Through the Looking Glass, added chortle — a combination of snort and chuckle — to the English language.

Portmanteau comes from the English portmanteau luggage, a piece of luggage with two compartments. (Or as Carroll wrote, “two meanings packed up into one word.”)

Our language is filled with portmanteaus: smog (from smoke and fog), motel (motor and hotel) and brunch (breakfast and lunch).

How to play with portmanteau.

Ready to make like Shakespeare and coin your own word? Here are four techniques to try:

1. Create a Wordoid.

Just plug in an existing word or word fragment, click a button, and Wordoid will create a slang word for you. Here are some of the results I got when I plugged in the words edit, coach, consult, rewrite and train:

• Coachieving
• Consultimate
• Rewritering

How can you use Wordoids to make your copy more creative?

2. Combine two words like Sam Horn.

Sam Horn, the goddess of developing creative book titles, offers this process for coining half-and-half words.

• List your key words in two columns. Also consider prefixes and suffixes you can add to your key words to create new words.

Bad	+	Advocate	=	Badvocate
Chart	+	Article	=	Charticle
Glamour	+	Grunge	=	Glunge

• Review the list. Try combining at the first half of the key words in column A with the second half in column B.
• Combine the first half of the key words in column B and the second half in column A.

The result: New words like the term one of Horn’s clients came up for her book about how obesity can lead to chronic diseases. You guessed it:

Diabesity.

3. Gain inspiration from WordSpy.

Check out online tools like Verbotomy and WordSpy for novel words that surprise and delight you. Here, a handful from WordSpy:

• Apostrofly n. An errant or misplaced apostrophe, particularly one that seems to have been added randomly to the text.
• Diworsify v. To make something worse by diversifying.
• Googleganger n. A person who has the same name as you, and whose online references are mixed in with yours when you run a Google search on your name.
• Momoir n. A memoir about motherhood. — momoirist n.
• Proem n. A prose poem; a work written in prose but incorporating poetic imagery and rhythms.

By reading great neologisms, you can inspire yourself — almost program yourself — to coin more creative terms.

4. Model the masters.

Collect your favorites portmanteaus, take them apart, put them back together and find ways to create words that work for you and your topics.

Here are some of the best from my collection:

Mario shrugs smugly, a sort of smrug.

— Paul Murray, novelist, in Skippy Dies

Capitalistas: A disease of misplaced importance. Ex: The Engineer will run the Project, and the Accountant will send Invoices at the end of each Quarter.

— Sally Jacques, head of information management and investor services at Standard Bank South Africa

Profanitype:  the special symbols used by cartoonists to replace swear words (points, asterisks, stars, and so on).

— Rich Hall, writer on “Not Necessarily the News”

Dialexia: being terrible at transcribing phone numbers.

— Barbara Wallraff, author of Word Fugitives

CFNO: A CFO (Chief Financial Officer) whose answer always seems to be No no matter how large or small the purchase request. (Not to be confused with COR: Chief Obstacle Remover).

— BuzzWhack

Play with portmanteau, noodle with neologism.

Freshly minted words get more attention than tired coinages. So what words can you smash together to make new ones?

Who knows? In a couple of hundred years, it might be hard to believe they haven’t always existed. And in the meantime, they’ll make your message more engaging.

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