Make it Up to Get Made in the Shade

You never pass spell check.

Something feels off with you. You are not quite right. The words you use are foreign to the ear, existing without visas, and claiming asylum in the pages of our world. Arranged in awkward sentences like higgledy headstones—the broken teeth of your misspeaking mouth—they are an assault soon to be reported to the relevant authorities. The dictionary people. The vocabularistocrats.  

Red line.

Your made-up words from your made-up mind on this made-up scene gettin’ made. Here, the sound of a vowel being wrapped in a blanket and thrown in a trunk. There, the scream of a consonant protesting in the night. Your letters are footsoldiers creating pure chaos on the battlefield. Sometimes nouns, sometimes verbs, but always ALWAYS the spelljuriscium.

This means magic.

The pocus is strong with this one.

This is just your voice. This is just your art.

But the words you use are not the right words—not as we know them. Not in the dictionary makers’ sphere. Words like yours don’t roll off someone’s tongue to bask in the glory of an audience. There is no Pulitzer on their horizon. Words like yours will never be an answer on Jeopardy.

Or will they?

These are your words. You can use them as you wish. And you do.

Cuffspeculent.

This means you are simply making it up as you go along. This means you are being true to you. This means—to use a word that gets thrown out to sea like it’s some kind of life ring—you are being authentic in the making of your spelljurisciums.

All life is fiction in the memory of it, and the memory of it is what you’re writing. What you’re telling. You live within the paragraphs and pages, flitting from house to house, engaging with characters who themselves are making it up on the spot. This is a thin-air world, blooming to life from the gas of a billion lies and truths and misspellings. There is a word for that too—the made from thin air word.

That word is oxymarigumation.

Nothing is real, but oh so real.

Nothing is true but always spoken. With confidence. With fear. With certainty.

Art!

The lexicon is a moveable feast. A moveable type. A made-up thing. How many words are there for snow again? Are you being snowed right now? Are you flaking or waking? Should we be so rigid in our interpretations of these vocalizations and what is voice anyway? What is voice but the arrangement of words—some known, some unknown—in ways that are pushed about by history?

Even truth is making it up as it goes along. Guess what? It never passes spell check either.

Is art truth? Or is art the biggest typo of all?

People are complicated and there are no blanket words or blanket definitions and even the word blanket is lying. Statement or cloth—the truth lies in the washing instructions.

Not all letters are created equal, either. You are better hiding behind an O than an I. An I is too thin. Too definitive. You have to know who U are to hide behind an I.

Semantics.

Use all the words. Old ones, new ones, invented ones. Submit your words for assessment and definition and the rigorous spell check of your work. But for the love of Wordle, above all things keep making it up as you go along. Please. Keep pushing the edges of the letters to smudge our understanding of what is real and true and what is not in the storytelling and the creation.

Make up words. Make up stories. Make up worlds that exist outside this one, because this one doesn’t pass spell check all the time either.

Don’t hold back.

Trust your audience. Someone out there will understand what you’re saying. Someone will be filing your words away for later as a source of comfort. As a source of understanding.

Speak of what you are made of. Bones of brittleaisium, brain of softulent matter. Your blood flows with the slinkamblitude of the widest Gustonian river. May Gust bless your house and all who reside within.

Live your cuffspeculent life through your art, huffing on the result of a world swimming in spoils of oxymarigumation. Weave your spelljuricism all around the spinning heads of the vocabularistocrats.

Make your words work for you.

Because these are just words and you are just a person putting them together in ways you hope are pleasing to other brains. Know that lying in your art can be a truth in itself, but lying in your life can be turdulasterous.

This means death.

Be a true person, to who you are and what you mean, and you’ll have it made in the shade. And if you don’t know what that means, look it up.1

Listen to me read this post to you, here 👇

Make it up to Get Made in the Shade - Field of Streams

Today’s episode was inspired by two things, nonce words and a book I love called the Meaning of Liff. It’s an episode about making up words, which many of you will know is one of my favorite things to do. There are some made up words in the episod…

Buzzsprout

Go behind the scenes of this post 👇

Even more background information, videos, and related links at the full Behind the Streams episode page, here.

This week’s amends…

All about nonce words.

Via The Breads

On Rotation: “Oh Well” by Fleetwood Mac. I guess I have to say The Original Fleetwood Mac. The Peter Green Fleetwood Mac.

Greeny (both the man and the guitar) in action. I saw Kirk Hammet now has Greeny. What a guitar.

“It’s this world or nothing.”

Advertisement for the United Nations Global Compact using Carl Sagan audio.

Via YT algorithm

Hundreds of pounds of pasta were dumped in the woods in New Jersey. Yeah, I don’t know either.

Via Neatorama

Shameless Podcast Plug

Listen to audio versions of early issues of The Stream on my podcast, Field of Streams, available on 👉 all major podcasting platforms 👈

Here’s Apple