As an English teacher it is my duty to educate my students how to speak English grammatically correctly and also to be able to identify the correct adjectives and vocabulary to use in an everyday life...
My job does not include the creation of a brand new word... however...
I have a student in my morning class by the name of Alvaro from Spain who enjoys extreme sports and is what most people would refer to as an outdoor type of person. Somewhere along the line during class joking and conversation Alvaro came to be regarded by the class as something close to the Spanish Chuck Norris.
It was in this mornings class that we were talking about adjectives to describe personality including words like calm, bossy and adventurous.
It was upon this word I took to the board and wrote this as a joke...
Alvarious (adjective)
/æl-vɑr-i-əs/
- used to describe someone who is exceptionally adventurous
- a person who laughs in the face of danger
"I'm feeling very alvarious tonight"
"He must be incredibly alvarious if he wants to jump out of that moving plane without a parachute"
I had forgotten the influence of the board and upon turning round at least one student was faithfully copying down the new adjective. Ben Parker's words "with great power, comes great responsibility" that he said to Peter Parker sprung into my mind and while the majority of students had already grasped it was a joke I explained that this wasn't a real adjective... or was it? Technically any word that gets used is a word, even if it is not official in the Oxford dictionary, and that is the clincher. If a word is used by enough people to enter the common speech of the population it will become an officially recognised as a word. Therefore from this day forward the word alvarious will be used on a daily basis for it already is a word and the birth of that word was today.
