I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again. In my obituary, My Beautiful Wife’s name will be preceded by the words, “His long-suffering wife…”  She puts up with a lot. I’m no picnic.

And you say to yourself, “Oh how bad could it really be?”

Try sitting on the couch, minding your own business, petting the dog and playing Solitare on the laptop when a Taco Bell commercial comes on the television.

“THERE’S NO SUCH WORD AS MELTY!!! IT’S MELTED, YOU FUCKTARDS!!!”

Yeah. I get a little carried away. I do. My face goes purple.

Same way when local (former GMA) weatherman Dave Murray works this gem into every fucking forecast: “Changeable skies.” Yes, changeable is a word, but what he really means is “changing.”  “Changeable” is a squishy hedge against making an actual prediction. Which… Yaknow… Is Dave Murray’s job. Dumbass. Stonehenge is fucking changeable too, if you zoom out to the 5-Eon graphic.

So let’s take this a bit further on Wordcraft Wednesday. Actress Kristen Stewart — second only to Jim Carey in renown for their multitude of rubber-faced overemoting — penned a poem that she published in Marie Claire.

I present to you the first stanza. (BTW, this is not a joke.)

My Heart Is A Wiffle Ball

I reared digital moonlight
You read its clock, scrawled neon across that black
Kismetly … ubiquitously crest fallen
Thrown down to strafe your foothills
…I’ll suck the bones pretty.
Your nature perforated the abrasive organ pumps
Spray painted everything known to man,
Stream rushed through and all out into
Something Whilst the crackling stare down sun snuck
Through our windows boarded up
He hit your flint face and it sparked.

(read it all here)

Sure, I know what you’re thinking. I also know what you think that I am thinking. But you’re wrong. I’m not going to wail on Kristen’s poem like a deranged Kennedy wielding a golf club. I just wish to surgically extract that word. Kismetly.

Kismetly is not a word on this planet or any other. And you know what? I’m fine with that. Turning a dusty noun (kismet) into an adverb isn’t exactly breaking the language.

So why do I go apoplectic over melty and not kismetly? Because melty ignores the fact that we already have perfectly serviceable descriptor (melted) that plugs into the same hole and delivers the same visual energy.

Whereas I have no issue making up a word if there isn’t one that fits perfectly. Le mot juste. Ironic that the phrase for “the perfect word” comes to us in French. French was the language of diplomacy largely because it had so many words of specificity. There are an estimated 45,000 words in the French language. The number of words in the English language has topped one million. Hmmm. This is because when we don’t have a word that services the thought, we fucking make one up. Chicanonomics. Selfie. Tween. Woot. Mankini.

I once described the sound of a busy restaurant as “a cacophony of tinkle and spink.” Spink isn’t exactly a “made up word.” It’s more onomatopoeia. But still. I reserve the right to make up a word if I can’t find le mot juste in the lexicon of common English.

And the spackle of wet words into a cracked existence is near and dear today, as today is the birthday of the Bard. Shakespeare made up a boatload of words.  Bareface. Dwindle. Dauntless. Outbreak. Torture. Obscene. Puking. Gnarled. Submerge. Monumental. Grovel. Dozens of others.

Happy birthday, Billy. You’re no Kristen Stewart, but you did the best you could, given the crippling lack of Taylor Lautner in your life.