to people who don't like neologisms and who do like elegant language

It's always good to have to rethink and even justify one's fundamental suppositions, but it's rarely a wholehearted pleasure!

I am frustrated trying to communicate with folks who share some of your concerns and intellectual approaches. It is amazing how wide some of these intellectual gulfs are. The language one is so daunting. I have to laugh when I realize we are on opposite soap boxes there! You think English has plenty of good words and as a matter of principle don’t believe in neologisms, but I come from and value intellectual traditions that rejoice in a totally different vision of English!

I'm a junkie for English language histories and theories about the distinctive properties of English as a language. I've studied literature in Old, Middle, Modern (ie Shakespearean) and contemporary Englishs (and taught English as a foreign language and so on). (My UG thesis was on Beowulf in Old English.) Frankly, from my traditions refusing neologisms in English is not like putting your finger in the dyke, it's more like mistaking the dyke for the ocean!

English is one of the world languages with the largest vocabularies, much larger than the vocabularies of the Romance languages for example. One reason is because English is so good at and depends so much on neologisms and on borrowed words. The ability of English to do this is one of the reasons (though not the only one, power matters too) that English is now a global set of many Englishes, its words used all over the world, and why it is an increasing lingua franca (!) as well as its associations with the most colonizing power today! I taught English in Thailand, where people learn what one could only call "Thai English" from the time they enter school. When I was in Sweden everyone of a post war generation spoke English (before then it had been German).

People who speak English have never had the kinds of language regulation you get in, say, France (lingua franca), where they regulate new words, either coinage or borrowings, and which is why French isn't any longer a useful global language for technology, globalization, economics or even media today.

New words are Good! They are good to use, to think with, to share, to dream about, to love, to hate, to make communities inside and outside and so on. They matter in all these ways, and I love and appreciate new words, love to make them myself, love the work of folks who coin terms and phrases, and find their work among the most valuable in my own education, life, and aesthetics!

Voila! The gulf!

Nor do I believe that using neologisms, per se, creates work that folks won't read. Now I don't know which people will read MY work, but I don't believe for one minute that if they don't it will be because I use neologisms or try to come up with language for thinking new thoughts, for noting features of reality that we don't have good terms for, or for clunky language. I and many others read all kinds of stuff that does all these things, and my own teachers and others I admire and emulate do all those things and are read widely and even commercially. So I simply know one does not entail the other. I don't mean by saying this however to claim that I will be widely read or commercially successful however. I think other factors, some of them totally contingent, others perhaps to do with my own skills and value, figure in all this.

In fact, my own projects are at their very heart about coming up with language for thinking with, word-places or points that cry out for something English doesn't yet have. Feminism-and-writing-technologies is a term I want to make work in these ways and all of my writing is about doing that, all of it. That's the whole point.

I love, for example, science fiction like Suzette Hadin Elgin's (a linguist once from UC-Santa Barbara) Native Tongue, in which the women of that world create a new language Laadan, in order to change reality. The whole book is a wonderful teasing joke about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. I especially love her description of "encodings," which are new morphological bits that make speakable elements of reality that are unnamable until they come into being. Or science studies like Bowker and Star's Sorting Things Out, which is all about classification and creating languages that reflect new classifications of the world.

I think it is a current problem that many folks seem to have somehow bought ideas about language generally and English in particular with what amount to anti-intellectualisms that glorify pretend immediacies: the misrecognitions of so-called "accessibility" for example. This is precisely one of the arguments I keep trying to work through: a refusal to take "accessibility" or "clarity" for granted as seeming unproblematic "Goods" instead of an ideology of contemporary capitalisms, with a history in, among other things, advertising.