I just watched this TED talk by a man who makes up words to describe obscure emotional feelings such as the hunger for disaster, or the fear of achieving your goals… He describes words at one point as ‘keys into people’s minds.’
That’s very apt. Language in essence is a form of mind control. I can take the right words and put an idea in your head, or change your view on something. But an effective phrase or word can become overused, and die. These are the cliches of the world. And us writers, on the front line of the word war, must step over the fresh corpses of overused metaphors and similes, and create new, stronger, better soldiers to continue the fight.
It would be a strange feeling of power to see a word I invented come into common use…
Jonas David 