Microsoft Word Revised Syllabus Ver doc

Word Formation 
There is less downright creation of words, even by the boldes innovators, than is 
popularly supposed. Hart Crane’s “thunder is galvothermic” (from “The Tunnel”) creates a 
word not registered in the dictionaries: but its component parts makes clear the sense of 
“electrically warm”. (The fuller form “galvanothermic” would have been more conventional.) 
Thomas Hardy subdues language to his purposes when he writes verbs like “to unbe”, 
“unillude,” or “unbloom,” and nouns like “unease” and “lippings (meaning “talk”). James 
Joyce has experimented in the creation of new word forms to meet special needs, especially 
adapted to the passages of interior monologue in Ulysses. 
Joyce tried to approximate the stuff of our flowing wakeful Consciousness by 
reproducing in speech the leaps, combinations, and blurrings of word and image 
characteristic of our private thoughts. Only certain parts of the novel are composed in this 
fashion. Cutting across these are sharp word-images recording the sounds and sights of the 
objective world. Onomatopoeia shapes some of the new formations of words. A long-held 
note of a song, a “longindying call,” is said to dissolve in “endlessnessnessness”; a woman’s 
hair is “wavyayeavyheavyeavyevyevy”; the sound of passing horses’ hoofs becomes 
“Steelhoofs ringhoof ring.” . . . Disjointed meditation is indicated by clipped forms: “He 
saved the situa. Tight trow, Brilliant idea.” But is not worthy that the most audacious coiners 
of verbal currency are limited to units capable of conveying sense – and therefore meaningful 
because they are in some degree familiar. 
Punning 
It is a technique now being exploited once more in all seriousness after centuries of 
disrepute. It is made possible by the existence of homonyms in a language: words identical in 
spoken form but having different meanings, often different origins. The spelling may or may 
not differ. In Shakespeare’s day this double use of homonyms was considered a legitimate 
adjunct of superbly serious style. It was not limited, although it was also applied, to joking 
frivolous discourse. In Julius Caesar the words of Mark Antony spoken alone over the dead 
body in the Senate— 
O world, thou was the forest to this hart, 
And this indeed, O world, the heart of thee- 
Were not meant to elicit smiles. The conscious balancing of the two homonyms was 
felt to heighten the intensity of Antony’s tribute because it offered an auditory bond, “hart: 
heart,” for the linking of two very serious metaphors. 
Among modern writers James Joyce is again the most conspicuous exploiter of the 
pun. He uses it as part of his general attempt to widen the scope of language. There are 
tentative trial instances in Ulysses: “she rose and closed her reading rose of Castille,” or 
“With the greatest alacrity, miss. Douce agreed. With grace of alacrity . . . she turned 
herself.”