LOST IN SEMANTICS

Innovation is truly omnipresent. Beyond the countless gadgets that have earned the ‘smart’ prefix, innovation also resides in the English language. Here are some neologisms.

Roald Dahl invented ‘churgle’ in Fantastic Mr Fox to refer to gurgling with laughter. Sure sounds like what it means! A century earlier, Lewis Carroll invented ‘chortle’ to mean noisy laughter. This word was coined by Czech writer Karel Capek, who used it in his 1920s play called Rossum’s Universal Robots. It comes from the Czech word ‘ robota’, which means ‘forced labour’.