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Sometimes I adjective my verbs (as opposed to verbing my nouns), making up a new word in the process:
(unwindy night ~= night for unwinding) If I do this, is there any case for "dangling" the y off of the end of the verb like so:
or is that more confusing? |
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Of course you are totally free to make up needed words on the spot. This kind of ad-hoc language play is the innate right of all speakers. The process follows certain rules, nevertheless. Let's take your example:
At first read, without seeing your explanation, I thought this meant that Friday nights are characterized by a lack of wind. Here, "unwinding" would fit just right and obviate the need for a nonce coinage. The usual thing is to flag or mark the novel use in some way, so I agree with your idea of "unwind-y," or potentially "unwind-ey" or something to alert the reader that unusual maneuvers are afoot. Unfortunately, "wind" (breeze) and "wind" (coiling) are homographs, so "unwindy" is unhappy. Consider:
While it's always acceptable to push the envelope, language-wise, you have to consider the puzzle you're presenting the reader and offer sufficient clues to allow smooth decoding. |
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Since unwindy is not an established word that a person would be familiar with, using the hyphen can assist the reader to parse the word properly. The word unwindy has two possible parses:
By writing the word as unwind-y, you help the reader to parse unwind as a unit, which can only be interpreted as the verb, and then apply the -y adjectivizing suffix. Certainly, this construction is non-standard, but so is the word unwindy itself. If you want to use it in an informal context, go for it! Creating ad-hoc words is part of what makes language fun. |
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