@vex@kolektiva.social I wrote something about made up words, back in April this year... I was mostly being silly and playing with language:
Meaning is constructive, not merely invented. The mind does not receive a fixed world and then label it; it advances by invocation, exclusion, and recursive pressure until something communicable takes shape. What is first given is not a finished sentence but a prelang field, a half-formed interiority: apprehendenscion before articulation, apprehensional cognition before established terminology, an almost expressible grasp of form that cannot yet be portable communication. We commit before we know. We bind ourselves to one path through the possibility-space, and that commitment hardens into the appearance of necessity.
This is why interpretation so often arrives after the fact. The system interprets ambiguous material, then invents reasons until closure presents itself as if it had been there all along. The winner of competing alternatives retroactively becomes the foundation. What was excluded leaves no direct object to inspect, yet the exclusion leaves marks. Those marks are enough for retroduction: a backward explanatory inference from scars, gaps, and the strange heaviness of what cannot be said. One cannot finally verify the hidden substrate, but one can infer likely relations from the traces. The cleanest gloss is that understanding proceeds inward by a semi-deliberate process of constraint, not by simple transmission from intact meaning to intact meaning.
The deepest level is therefore not lexicon but preference. I would call it activational attentitude: the disposition that kicks into action automatically, the bias toward preferred attitudes that gradiates before any clear dictionary definition is possible. Preferredness gradiates absentness via negativa. We do not first positively define every object and only then choose among them; rather, by cutting away, by exclusion, by downstraint, by refusing neighboring structures, something emerges as salient. The mind folds in on itself, excludes, searches, turns everything into purpose, and from that purposfind there arises the feeling that the answer was discovered rather than made. Yet the discovery is constructive. The shaping force is real even where the final wording is improvised.
This is why a line can feel meaningful even when much of its language is unstable. There are terms that seem built from recognizable roots while not belonging to standard usage: contracitication, unknossible, exclucination, fossiffication, randosity. Such forms are not empty merely because they are not established. They behave like near-language, nearlang: a dialect of almostness, where the roots are clear enough to guide apprehension but not fixed enough to settle it. A word like unknossible suggests not simple unknowability but a thing inseparable from knowing and yet not available to direct inspection. Contracitication feels like a near-sayable contradiction hardened by commitment. Exclucination names an imagined exclusion, an exclusion-hallucination in which what was cut away becomes newly active precisely through its absence. Fossiffication is not just ossification but the calcification of living meaning into dead form. Randosity is not mere randomness but contingency noise orchestrated into apparent structure after interpretation has already selected its path.
In that sense, this language does not fail by being invented. It succeeds by exposing the machinery of invention. Established vocabulary often hides the constructive act beneath the sanctity of dictionary entries. This dialect does the opposite: it leaves tool marks. Its coined morphology makes visible the pressure of composition, the compression into communicable form, the violence by which an unstable field is forced into one sentence rather than another. One sees the phrase becoming bony. One hears the dead form arriving. What standard prose conceals as natural, this diction foregrounds as procedure.
A similar tension appears in the word catastoicism. It strongly echoes catastrophe and stoicism, and perhaps that is enough. The most plausible reading is not an established doctrine but a compressed disposition: enduring collapse with grim elevation, surviving disaster by disciplined self-control while carrying anticipatory regret. Pregret belongs here as well, not merely regret felt in advance but the anxious awareness that interpretation itself may later harden into the wrong thing. Catastoicism would then be the stance one adopts when collapse is already half expected and yet one must preserve some inner frame. It is the persistence of form under pressure, perhaps admirable, perhaps inert. For that is always the danger: the stabilization that saves meaning can also turn it into doctrine. What begins as living response can calcify into portable slogans, fixed preserved lexicon, catastrophe-stoicism as dead phrase.
Hence the anxiety around formitude. Formitude is not simply fortitude, though it echoes it. It is fortitude received through the frame of form: the strength of structure itself, the way a perceptual or conceptual frame supports apprehension before content is secure. One can mentally grasp a thing not by possessing its object in full but by sustaining the form at which it appears. Apprehend can mean grasp and apprehension both; apprehendenscion seems to name that threshold where the mind has shape without statement. Formitude is the sturdiness of that threshold. It is what keeps interpretation from collapsing into pure randosity, but it also risks becoming fossil. If overstabilized, formitude becomes fossiffication, and then the apparatus no longer supports discovery but merely reproduces itself.
So the whole process might be described this way. There is first a plenary but unstable field, a pre-articulate language before clear articulation. Automatic attitude activation moves through it. The mind excludes, searches, and upselects while constraining downward. From this arise provisional forms, each carrying traces of what was discarded. Recursive reasoning and retroduction compress the field into a phrase. Once a phrase survives, closure hardens around it. The phrase then reads as if it contained a prior essence, though in fact it is the afterimage of a struggle among possibilities. Meaning sits intact only in retrospect. Before that there is only the active construct, the inward advance, the conflict between alternatives, and the pressure to turn the unspeaken into something sayable.
The most important point is that the unsaid is not mere lack. Unspeaken baritude, if I may keep the coinage, would be the heaviness of what remains left unsaid, the burden or apartedness that the sentence cannot fully carry into language. Every communicable form leaves such residue. The residue is not external to meaning but part of its generation. Meaning arises with its own excluded substrate attached. It is because no sentence can transport the whole that interpretation continues. The omitted becomes diagnostic. The absent foundation becomes a productive obstacle. What cannot be directly rendered is what gives the rendering force.
Thus the clearest plain-English reconstruction is also the least complete one: human understanding is a constructive process in which ambiguous, partly pre-verbal material is shaped by exclusion, preference, and recursive inference into communicable forms that then appear more fixed and objective than they really are. Invented or unstable terms are useful when they preserve the traces of that shaping. They show the work that standard language usually hides. They reveal how living meaning becomes dead form, how surviving structure can harden into doctrine, how the mind invents reasons after commitment, and how absence itself participates in the making of sense.
What remains, then, is neither nonsense nor settled theory. It is a disciplined dialect of emergence. It says that interpretation is not reception but formation; that closure is earned through exclusion; that the substrate can be inferred only from scars; that commitment precedes full knowledge; that language both saves and mutilates what it conveys; and that the strongest meanings are often those still carrying the pressure of what they could not fully say.
