La (neo)lógica de las lenguas

Alubiada, like, televermut, flamencólico... we cannot stop creating words: languages ??need our imagination and our collective complicity to catch up, and they can never escape our desire to name what surrounds us: it is the (neo ) logic of languages: the impetus that leads them to reinvent themselves, like Madonna, so as not to go out of style. This book walks through the neologism formation procedures, fleeing from rules and theories: instead, it talks about loanwords that are warrior princesses, compounds as fast as a Japanese bullet train, acronyms that close worse than the trunk of la Piquer or the irreconcilable differences that exist between the Pantoja neologisms and the Winehouse neologisms. There are xenisms that dock in dark alleys, words queuing up for a casting, and a lady in a flowered robe that goes by the name of Antonomasia. All this troupe of characters helps us to understand why the spark that ignites among speakers when using a newly unpacked word is so special, what makes some of them more ingenious than others, and the consequences that this has for our way of understanding the world: in lexical creativity there are a good handful of paradoxes that define our language, but also the eternal idyll that we have with it. In addition, it tries to give some notes on the love-hate relationship between newly created words and dictionaries... and how it affects us speakers to be in the midst of that crossfire of definitions, categories and ideological biases. An attempt, in short, to make those of us who love words lose the fear of reinventing them whenever we feel like it.