Hi Patricia,
I saw a wonderful clip for the Mary Poppins/Walt Disney movie with Emma Thompson, and her character TL Travers was chastising the Sherman Brothers for making up words in their songs. “That’s not a real word, get rid of it!”

Cut to a shot of them hiding the music for “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious”.

If we didn’t make up words, the English language would stagnate, and we’d have no fun.

Snirtle! Oh Sally, I love it. Is it when a turtle sneezes? No, that’s too easy. It can be one of those laughing-shorting-crying jags where you can’t stop, and you keep laughing and snorting and crying because it’s so funny.

Absolutely Kate! We’ve paid our dues, now it’s time to play. Come here little words, I’m going to give you a makeover!

Eileen, puddle-luscuious sounds fabulous. As always, when the right word doesn’t exist, you have to go ahead and invent it.

oooh Dorothy, thank you very much for spotting that.

And thanks for posting the proper link.

It’s a wonderful resource, that’s for sure.

I did notice though, that your link to the etymology dictionary is incorrect. It should be .com, not .org. 🙂 http://etymonline.com/

Another amusing way to find words that should have a meaning is to play online Boggle. On a difficult 5×5 board it is such fun to start playing with the letters. I typed in Snirtle once: the word isn’t real, yet, but I’m sure it is a type of Snarfle! 🙂

So much unused potential in our language! Thanks for the thoughts.