Elusive Language

Following in the veins of my earlier post, the Atlantic last month reminded its readers why they still turn to the back page for the language section. Shakespeare coined roughly 500 new words during his time as a respected public playwright, and the Atlantic does its best to uphold this English tradition, not by finding new uses for longstanding words, but by finding gaps in the language, where a word is needed to describe a certain cultural phenomenon or social advancement. In the latest edition they uncovered one such gap. How can we describe the commodity, or entity, that we see so often when not needed, and yet cannot find when so desperately required? Recall that frequent scenario: walking past cash machines every few yards, and yet searching high and low for hours for one when you finally run out of cash. The winner, which, intuitively, could be used to describe this very practise of word-searching, is 'elusiversal'. How wonderfully that word now appears. I predict a dictionary entry for 2010.