Let’s say somebody you know is having a “singles only” party on Valentine’s Day, and since you’re currently #SingleAndReadyToMingle, you can’t wait to go. You have a friend who is also single, so you invite her to tag along.
“When is Valentine’s Day again?” your friend asks. “Next weekend,” you reply. “That soon?” your friend asks in a tizzy. “No, the weekend after next, the 14th, duh,” you say, impatiently. It’s such a pain in the keister having to use the wordy phrase “the weekend after next” every time, isn’t it? Why isn’t there a word that means simply “the thing after the next thing”?
All your dreams have come true, because there ?finally is.
It’s called “oxt.”
So let’s modify the above conversation, but instead let’s use our handy new word.
“When is Valentine’s Day again?” she asks. “Oxt weekend,” you say. Conversation over.
See how much easier that was? Just think of all the time we will save thanks to Ivan Cash and Jeremy Knight, the genius creators of this ?concise adjective.
This time we save can be spent doing so many other things, like eating snacks, taking selfies, signing petitions on change.org, playing Flappy Bird or even making outdated references in columns.
But why stop there? Let’s shorten other phrases too.
Take this common one: “I got all A’s this semester mom, love you.” That’s just too much to say, so let’s make it “send money please.”
Or how about this correspondence I’m sure you’ve had with your roommate: “Sorry I ate all your Doritos, I thought they were mine.” So wordy! “I ate your Doritos because I hear you having sex with your boyfriend every night” is much more concise.
All of my proposed modifications point to a truism of language that is often overlooked: language is ?adaptable. Words are constantly gaining or losing meaning, and new words appear all the time. Just think of “selfie” and “hashtag.”
These words didn’t exist 10 years ago. For the longest time the symbol “#” meant pound on a telephone, or it signified a number.
Now, when I see a “#” I think “hashtag.”
It’s easy to claim that words such as tweet or selfie are mere child’s play. Those can’t be real words because they haven’t been around for ?hundreds of years.
Just because a word hasn’t been around “forever” or isn’t in the dictionary yet doesn’t mean it’s not a word. That doesn’t discount the meaning with which a society fills a word. Language is a relatively new invention. Words didn’t just appear out of nowhere. They were created much in the same way that the words “oxt” and “bae” were created: out of culture.
Language has holes.
We create new words to fill these holes. When Cash and Knight thought up “oxt,” they did so because they saw a hole they thought needed to be filled.
Childish innuendo aside, oxt won’t happen unless you make it happen. Don’t stop trying. That’s the beauty of language: It’s anything you want it to be.
zipperr@indiana.edu
