Sidewards

Since sometime in junior high, I have wanted to coin a word. Before you ask, yes I’ve been a geek that long. But anyhow, I learned that if a word is used in literature three times (or something like that) then it gets considered for coinage. And if a word becomes used frequently enough (such as the word “blog”), it will eventually be added to the dictionary. That’s what I want. Inclusion in a dictionary. And not a Scrabble dictionary either.

So anyhow, the best word I’ve come up with so far is soggify. It means to make soggy. For example, milk will soggify cereal (especially Life cereal if you leave it in too long and then it just tastes too mushy to eat).

It’s not particularly exciting, but it’s pretty straightforward in its definition, I think, and seems a word that should already exist. But it doesn’t.

Well, for the longest time, my four-year-old would use the word “sidewards” instead of “sideways.” I thought it was so adorable, but of course, I corrected him. But then I started thinking about it, wondering why he kept saying sidewards instead of sideways. And it’s simple. What are the other directional terms? Forward, Backward, upward, and downward. So why shouldn’t it be sideward?

Incidentally, the word does exist. It’s in the dictionary, on m-w.com and dictionary.com (I don’t actually use a physical one anymore). But it seems to have gone out of favor once the word sideways came along. But why? What makes “sideways” better than “sidewards”? It’s just not fair. So I think from now on, I’m going to have to start using the word sidewards. It is, after all, a real word. But I do have to admit that after looking at the word for a while, it looks strange. Like when you’re taking a true and false test and after writing “false” a number of times you look at it and have to wonder whether you spelled it right.

So I guess I’ll continue my quest to coin the word soggify.