Linguistic Statistic

According to what I just read, English has a vocabulary of 500,000-1,000,000 words, whereas French has 100,000. How do they manage? The score even includes words like le weekend!

Perhaps something is holding them back. They must start to create more! We often hear that Shakespeare invented 200 words which are still used today ("instinctively", "champion" as a verb, "torture", "mountaineer", etc.) so someone could give it a try.

Still, there is not a lot of chance of that today now that everything is set (or typeset) and settled and the only neologisms we get are such wondrous sparkling brilliancies as chav, which I barely understand and don't wish to go into any further.

Look up neologism (a neologism coined in 1803) and you will encounter the following:

In psychiatry, the term neologism is used to describe the use of words that only have meaning to the person who uses them, independent of their common meaning. This is considered normal in children, but a symptom of thought disorder...in adults.

Well what do you say to that?

Protboots, say I!