A word game—one with rather vague rules

Consider the word arachnophobia . It comes apart, my dictionary says, into arachne and phobia with the o in the middle left unexplained. Actually, I can't find my dictionary. It was an old one anyway, going back at least to 1955 when I first arrived at the University of Wisconsin and had to look up a word on a day when the library was closed but the bookstore wasn't. I dug out another, more recent, one, and it doesn't include the word arachnophobia at all! (Crummy modern stuff, carelessly dashed off in about 1993.)

But back to considering that polysyllable: the arachne part refers to spiders and the phobia part refers to fear, and the combination refers to a fear of spiders. There is—or ought to be—a good deal more there, tracing both parts back to ancient Greek or some stage of Latin or perhaps even all the way to a couple of hypothetical prehistoric Indo-European roots, but we don't need all of that for our word game: just the fact that the big one is made up of two smaller chunks of a standard type. Like geology which the dictionary I came up with says is made up of ge and logia . It claims ge refers to earth and logia to study, and all readers of this issue of The Hell You Say already knows what geology is.

So we have word beginnings and word endings and we can play with them, and that's the whole idea. To go with arachnophobia we could have arachnology , which could mean (and for all my dictionary will admit does mean) the study of spiders. Or geophobia which could mean (maybe it does and maybe it doesn't) a fear of dirt. There are lots of word beginnings available and lots of word endings available, and we can get started with arachnophilia , which presumably would refer to a fondness for spiders, and geometry which, historically anyway, meant the measurement of the earth, and so on.

The matter of whether the words constructible in this manner are to be found in a dictionary or not (and some particular dictionary should, perhaps, be chosen) introduces an element of chance into the game. Lots of candidates for looking up are available, and one way to partially crystallize the rules is to let A announce a manufactured word after which B tries to decide whether it will be found in the chosen dictionary or not. For example, A, thinking of anthropology and taxonomy might come up with anthroponomy , which perhaps could refer to a system of laws governing the investigation of people, or taxology , perhaps the study of possible arrangements of anything. My dictionary doesn't sanction either of these, so maybe I'd get points for them—but only if you thought they'd be listed there. If you thought not, I suppose you'd get the points.

Possibilities are endless. Consider geophagy , taxocracy , taxicracy , gynosophy , gymnocracy , hydrophilia , pseudonymy , and so on. Do these words already exist? You may already know, but if not, you can look them up to see—keeping in mind, of course, that the particular dictionary you are using may not know every word ever invented. A bit of additional fun could arise by guessing meanings for them. Taxocracy , for example, might refer to rule by studying possible arrangements or reinterpreted as rule by cutting (or increasing) taxes. Its variant, taxicracy could be reinterpreted in terms of traffic laws determined by cab drivers.

You want more definite rules than all that? Taxiludy ? Naay, too fakey. How about—well you get the point. And if we play it, probably most of the points as well. Just, if you can, try to avoid offending too many people with your inventions. Some might not like any of the possible meanings of that word taxocracy , for example. Oh, what the hell. Go on and offend ‘em. And by the way, in this game you don't need an opponent. You can play it by yourself. (A great idea: in fact, my wife, proofreading, just now observed that then you get all the points!)