What's That Mean?

I have been working on a short story for the last week and was considering using a word that did not exist, but I knew it would be easy enough for the reader to figure out:

That he wore a gun and a badge only added to Wengle’s phallicism.

I was using phallicism, based on the word phallic, was another word for sex appeal, but I wanted to convey more—a sexual magnetism. After all, as I later described him, “the guy gets more ass than a toilet seat.” In the end I decided against it. I wasn’t quite sure the narrator, who makes the toilet seat reference, would use such a word as phallicism.

Then I read Helen Swords column in the New York Times from last month. She was talking about these very types of words, where you take a known word and use it a different way by adding a “suffix like ity, tion or ism.”

Sword calls these “zombie words,” mostly because they suck the life out of your prose. She makes a good argument. When I was younger, living another life, I spent nineteen months as a police officer (someday I’ll write about it). When I left I went back to college to hone my skills as a writer. One of the comments I heard from my peers was, “You write like a cop.” It was true. Cops are very big on nominalizations, as are attorneys.

I took me a while, but I was able to purge the cop talk from my writing. It creeps back in every once in a while. When I spot it, I obliterate it.  

Still, after reading Sword’s column, I can’t help but think I sort of like the word phallicism. It said what I wanted it to say. The sin with nominalizations is when you use more than two in 10,000 words.  My only concern now is the same one I had in the beginning—I’m not quite sure the narrator would use that word.

See ya' later. 

WhatIfYouCouldNotFail.com by Tim Sunderland is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

 

Comments

[Virginia Llorca]

Phallicism sounds like a real word, but to me it doesn't denote sex appeal. It seems to reference totemic stuff. Like a guy stopping to buy a Corvette on the way home from getting his Viagra prescription refilled.

I made up a word and have used it once in each of two books. "Artifactual". It says exactly what I needed it to say at the moment, referencing an anachronistic object.

Isn't this writing stuff fun? Putting peoples lives into our hands.

[Tim Sunderland]

Are you referencing the "phallicism" of a Corvette? We're close enough on the use of the word. I'm going to use it in my story and see if my critique group calls me on it.

Can't find it in a dictionary, and SpellCheck doesn't like it, either.