Saturday, October 31, 2009

In honor of Halloween: Sonnet II

Slowly but surely I gather my motivation to continue this fruitless task! Faithful nonexistent readers, I direct your attention today to the neologism, or the 'invented' word. Shakespeare, famously, brought hundreds words into the English language. What many people don't know is that a lot of these words (and indeed, a lot of neologisms in general) were simply old words used in a new way-- for instance, a noun used as verb, or a verb used as a noun, or a noun used as an adjective, etc. By using recognizable English suffixes (-ed, -ing, -ly), a word can be used as almost any part of speech, even if a particular usage isn't part of our actual vocabulary yet. The English language was still pretty flexible through most of the Renaissance, before the idea of a 'right' and 'wrong' grammar really came into play (sometime in the eighteenth century when a few douches wrote some grammar manuels and everyone got huge prepositional sticks up their asses).

So I present to you my Halloween sonnet, complete with my very own neologism (according to Microsoft Word Spell-check, anyway).


Sonnet II: Halloween Women

So many choices on All Hallow’s Eve
The night of unrestrained imagination
We plan for months so that we may receive
Our compliments on that year’s costumation

And wondrous is woman’s inventiveness!
A simple costume can be so much more–
A cat or witch, with some attentiveness
To detail, can transform into a whore!

See there, a pirate with uncovered breast,
Too fine and healthy to have suffered scurvy!
A fairy flits in fishnets, barely dressed
(And Tinkerbell has never looked so curvy).

Tonight we can be anything we choose–
So long as we’re in heels, and full of booze.

1 comment:

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