Stranglitangly
June 22, 2026I'd love to say the words I want are on the tip of my tongue, but they aren't. I've been writing about a steamy jungle, and I feel I've run out of vocabulary to describe the place and its atmosphere. How many ways are there to say 'tangled', 'humid', or 'green'? I feel I've used every one of them at least half a dozen times, which is five times too many.
Resorting to Roget's Thesaurus hasn't helped. I searched under the headings 'jungle', 'foliage', 'tangle', 'greenery' and more, but only one or two of the abundant synonyms came close to what I was looking for. 'Vegetability', 'frondescence' and 'graminference', while being marvellous words to roll around the tongue, don't have quite the right feel, and if I hadn't looked them up, I would have had to guess what they meant. The connotations of 'umbrage', 'sucker' and 'arboreal' conjure far different pictures for me. I could use 'exotic', 'undergrowth' or 'overgrown', but they are far too bland.
Maybe I'll have to do what William Shakespeare did. Among the things he is renowned for are his many neologisms. There were no thesauruses (thesauri?) in his day, or even dictionaries. It appears that if a word escaped him, or did not exist, he simply made one up. He is estimated to have created around 1,700, including 'amazement' and 'suspicious'. Where would we be today without 'laughable'? Not all of his new words took, however. We can manage quite well without 'wappened'–what that means is anyone's guess. Yet at the time they first appeared, no one seemed to have trouble understanding them–perhaps because they sounded right. I don't mean onomatopoeia, but the words seem to conjure a false memory of something you had always known but forgotten.
It's a shame he couldn't have made up a few words about rainforests. There are more than a million words in the English language and none of them will do. I'm really not as good at neologisms as the Bard, but how about 'twistangly', 'granglious', or 'gyrously'?
Please talk amongst yourselves–this could take me some while.
Posted by K. S. Dearsley. Posted In : Biographical
