They say that Shakespeare coined hundreds, if not thousands of new words and phrases, including “one fell swoop”, “bedazzle”, “unearthly”, and even “eaten out of house and home”. How cool is that?
I think it would be great to go down in history for having coined a new word or phrase. I can imagine two ways of doing that. One is to die in some horrible, embarassing way, so that that particular means of death is forever known by my name.
I knew somebody in college whose father died by running into a tree while skiing, and have ever since thought of that particular means of death (Sonny Bono died that way) as being “Mackened”. I’ll read of somebody dying that way and think “He got Macked”.
However, my preferred way is to think up something so appropriate and original that everybody else picks it up without even thinking about it (but the OED knows!). The best I’ve come up with so far is “Defuckinitely”, as in “Extremely Definately”, but none of my friends seem too eager to take it up. I can’t blame them. Even I don’t say it.
I’d settle for introducing a new use of an existing word, much the way that “google” is now a verb meaning “to search”.
Unfortunately, I’m too unimaginative to ever come up with any of these things, and so I’m left with the hope that my cause of death is so immensely funny to those still living that it’s forever known by my name.
