New Words, Dead Words, Ghost Words
👻
🗝 Words Don’t Die—They Wander
Some words vanish.
Some mutate.
Some lie dormant like seeds in volcanic ash, waiting for the right speaker.
Language is alive. Not metaphorically, literally.
It breathes through us. It changes in the mouth. It forgets and returns.
† Thole once meant to endure patiently. It’s still waiting.
↯ Yeet was born from chaos and now lives in our phones.
☍ Quomodo meant “how” in Latin. Now it’s nowhere and everywhere.
⚰️ The Forgotten Ones
Not all words survive the timeline.
Some slip through the cracks.
Some are buried on purpose.
Some dissolve because we no longer need them, or because they knew too much.
- Snollygoster – a dishonest politician (banned for being too accurate?)
- Apricity – the warmth of the sun in winter
- Respair – fresh hope after despair (yes, it was real)
Ghosts. Every one of them. ☠
✣ Newborns in the Dark
We keep making more.
Language is a survival instinct.
When the old words fail, new ones grow in the cracks.
These are neologisms, portmanteaus, internet-born mutants:
- Doomscrolling
- Ghosting
- Liminality (resurrected, technically)
- Ship (as a verb, send help)
They arrive messy, uninvited, necessary.
They are living words.
“The dictionary is not the authority. It’s the morgue.”
— Unknown. Maybe me. Maybe you.
⚰️🗃
☽ The Words That Haunt
And then there are words we feel, but don’t have.
You’ve known them:
- The ache of wanting to return to a moment that never existed
- The soft panic of watching language fail during an argument
- The electric static of unspoken recognition in a stranger’s glance
These are ghost words.
Unwritten, unspoken, but deeply felt.
They hover over us.
🫥 You don’t say them.
You recognize them when someone else almost does.
⦿ The Lexicon Is You
You carry words that haven’t been said yet.
You are the lexicon’s edge.
Use them. Bury them. Twist them.
Language will survive you, and it will carry parts of you forward.
Write carefully.
Speak strangely.
And never forget:
No word is ever truly lost.
It’s just waiting to be remembered.
Return to the surface ◯