There's a word for words that are made up of other words. The word I was thinking of is not "neologism" which Webster's dictionary defines as "a meaningless word coined by a psychotic", but, rather, I was thinking of "portmanteau" (plural -teaus or port.man.teaux, 1579) from porter to carry + manteau mantle. Websters defines portmanteau as "a word or morpheme whose form and meaning are derived from a blending of two or more distinct forms" using the example of "smog" which is derived from "smoke" and "fog".
In the McLuhan spirit of invention, I propose a new game I call "Pret a Portmanteau". "Porter" means "to carry", but often also it means "to wear" (as in "Pret a Porter" = ready-to-wear).
The purpose of the game is to help people get to know one another, and to create a novel social venue. To play the game, people are each given a short phrase to carry or wear that "suggests" the new word. The phrase may be a small tag they wear, a shirt they wear, or it could even be incorporated into their name tag. As you will see shortly, this will cause people to wander around and look at each others' name tags.
The phrases each lead the person to the word. The examples I presented at a recent (2003 Jan 27) coach-house meeting for William Marshall's word "planfunders" were:
That's just one example, but we can take any word, such as "sousveillance" (a new word I made up from "sous" = French for "below", and "veiller" meaning "to watch").
Here are some phrases that would lead a person to re-invent (reconstruct) the new word:
These phrases could appear together on one "portmantra" (portable or wearable text, paper, cardboard, device, computer, etc.), or they could be distributed among several "portmantras".
For example, a dozen or so people could each be wearing a different phrase that's been born by the same "mother of invention". These "portasibblings" may then get to know each other, and those wearing the same word may in fact find each other. We could even throw in a Scamera Hunt (Scavideo Hunt) where you try to track down the word and photograph it and the person wearing it, or we could have a staff photographer who tries to group the wordwearers.
Some of the players could even wear a small LCD name badge or miniature LED sign, or wearable projector, so the whole thing could be a wiki.
I think if we made a Word Wiki that worked like a Ouija board (by the way, Ouija is another example of a "game" that people play at parties), we'd have something I'd call a "Ouiki" (from "Ouija" and "wiki"). Electric crowds of electrified individuals could then invent new words by intermingling. We're all cyborgs (as I describe in my book, "Cyborg: Digital Destiny...", http://wearcam.org/cyborg.htm), and such a game that's based on something we wear, helps to emphasize that words function as a true extension of our minds and bodies, just like clothing does. I'm not suggesting that we decontaminate anyone (http://wearcam.org/dusting/deconference/index.htm) but, rather, just that "technological clothing" makes us what we are.
We don't have to doff our "digital duds" to realize that we're already cyborgs (as we did in DECONference), but, instead, we can achieve a similar end by digitizing our duds with (de)context. Such deconTEXT printed on the name tags, or otherwise worn, turns the body into a carrier of the seeds upon which the invention of a "wordmeme" will be born. The body-borne (worn or carried) phrase makes us all carriers in the infectious inventiveness of the memetic nemisis of naming new words.
Pret a Portmanteau could help us realize our Digital Destiny, as creators of new tools, words being the tools of the informatic age.
Moreover, rather than limit it to existing words, we could invite people to make up new words, or phrases that call the new words. This could also be done as a collective deconsciousness, so that a true Ouiki is implemented.
A "portamenteau" is a series of words that crossfades from one word to the other.
I might make, for example, more than one new word for State Capitalism:
Relation to deconcrete poetry?