Papa Splerff?

                                                                                                                                                                                          
Being a writer, I’ve always wanted to add a word to the English language. Wouldn’t it be great if everybody was talking about sparjavu and they knew I had coined the term?
                                                                                                                                                                              
                                                                                                                                                              
​
“Oh, yes, the aromatic reminder of having had asparagus at dinner, or as Michael Rosenbaum calls it, the sparjavu”. (I was going to call it the echospear, but that word already exists. You have to move quickly on this stuff.)

Pat Riley invented the word Threepeat, and was smart enough to copyright it, so I probably owe him a dollar for mentioning his achievement. J.K. Rowling invented Muggles, Stephen Colbert (or one of his writers) came up with Truthiness, and Donald Trump invented Covfefe, as far as we know. Billy Shakespeare did it more than a dozen times, and he didn’t even know about indoor plumbing.

Somebody was the first to describe something as groovy, although she was probably too stoned to remember it. Likewise for party animal, word vomit, and brain fart. Heck, somebody had to be the first to use the word word. Imagine the long-term royalties from copyrighting that one.

I’ve made a few attempts at verbination (See what I did there? Huh?) over the years. In the corporate governance book I wrote with Marilyn Seymann in 2003, I came up with contrasynergy as the counterproductive result of mergers and strategies. As you know, contrasynergy is a household word today and everyone knows I am its father. Right.

(FWIW: Apparently, I blew my opportunity when someone was looking for just this word on Google Answers two years later and none of the respondents referenced contrasynergy. Clearly, that was my moment to grab fame and I lost out to “antergy,” which still gets less than 5,000 hits on Google.)

Later, I tried to come up with words meaning “he or she, (hesh)” “him or her (hirm),” and “his or hers (hirs),” but I didn’t get past Go. Every time I wrote one of these words, the explanation took longer than its sentence. As is the case with humor, if you have to explain it to people, it isn’t very good.
New words get invented all the time, so this shouldn’t be very difficult. The twisted charging cables in your drawer are a cabletti, the pizza delivery guy who can’t find your house is gipsless. Your longtime friend who is incredibly racist is a philorant. Man, I could do this all day.

But it’s not enough to make up a word. Somebody else has to repeat it. So far, no takers. Despite my generous and supremely creative efforts, the whole world isn’t watching.

My day will come, of course, but it won’t be when I want it or intend it. I’ll be walking down the street, trip and make some sort of a splerffing noise when I hit the ground and that will be the sound that defines my existence. Anytime someone falls with a splerff, bystanders will be reminded of me.

It’s not much consolation, of course. But if Murphy can live with his law and Ponzi’s okay with his scheming and Hobson's accepted his choice, I guess I can make it do.