Making Up Words–Accidentally
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As I was typing up one of my hand-written scenes this morning, my fingers got ahead of me again (I’m usually a hunt-and-peck typer), and I ended up typing this:
“If I could have run the mile in high school as fast as I made it back to the footbridge, John Wesley wouldn’t have been the only Carter on Bermudian’s record books for track. I thundered across the footbridge onto my own property, then collapsed in a panting, wheezing heap in the snow, clurching the painful stitch in my side.”
The word “clurching” is obviously a typo, but I laughed to myself thinking that it might be a clever word to use deliberately at some point. It would mean something along the lines of “clutching one’s side while running clumsily.” I could actually see it in a YA novel in which an out-of-shape character is trying to run the mile in gym class. As he/she runs, wheezing, out of breath, and clutching the painful stitch in his/her side, classmates stand at the sidelines watching and laughing at him/her. One of them coins the term “clurching,” and the unfortunate, out-of-shape classmate earns the nickname Clurch.
