When I was growing up, my friends used to tease me, lovingly, that I spoke my own language. Sometimes we called it “Shelbish.” 

I wholeheartedly embraced Shelbish. I still do.

I’m not alone in this habit. Shakespeare scholars are pretty open about the fact that the playwright often made up his own words to get his rhymes to work, so I thought to myself: “Making up words and phrases. Totally normal. It’s just a writer thing.”

So, this is a deeply engrained habit, AND since I’ve been writing since I was a kid, I have a lot of writerly phrases I throw around. I usually do this assuming that these terms are always phrases other people understand.

{Spoiler Alert: Not necessarily so.} 

But every once in a while, if you are making up a language, it’s a really good idea to check in to make sure that other people actually know what you are talking about.

As in, maybe I could take a second and define the word I’m using all the time.

So. I’m creating a whole Shelbish glossary.

P.S. **Kids in school, if your English teacher ever assigns you a sonnet in iambic pentameter, remember that Shakespeare made up his own words. Explain that Elizabethan England was a pre-dictionary era, so writers like Shakespeare tweaked words to make them fit the rhythm. (They also changed the spelling a lot too.) Then you can say: “So, why can’t we? You don’t expect us to meet a bigger challenge than SHAKESPEARE, do you????”