Ghost Words

My spelling and grammar for the most part are quite good.  My lexicon and my articulation I am aware extends beyond the vocabulary that most people use.  I don't speak like this day to day unless I am in the company of people who do, otherwise I adapt to the audience.  I write with a narrative voice that is truer to the voice in my head that articulates everything I think.  Every now and then when writing I will use a word, I know its meaning in context, I have never questioned the word itself before, and yet that little nefarious red line appears beneath it to highlight the fact it is seen as a spelling mistake.  For the most part they are, and I check the spelling and see my mistake, that's not always the case however.

A neologism is a word that has been coined and quite literally means "new speech" - these account for most of the red lines that appear when I write, as I use words and phrases that are part of modern day vernacular but are actually slang, informal, or just entirely made up words that have become associated with concepts as part of modern life and worked their way into our collective evolving language.

There are however a few other instances where that little red line pops up in protest and the most perplexing to me are what I describe as ghost words.   This isn't their actual name, and this term does exist and applies to something completely different.  That definition refers to words in the dictionary that are part of the language but no longer used so in essence "dead" for all intents and purposes.

My definition of ghost words however is something different and like I said I don't know the actual term for them.  I define them as words that we use which are not actually part of the language, nor are they slang, nor are they words we have coined.

Two examples I can give, one I used recently is "rottenous" and the other is "viewn" which when used in conversation go by without question.  Those who are native speakers know exactly what you mean, yet they aren't defined in the dictionary at all, and through the wonders of Google we can search and see we are not alone in our usage of the words.  "Viewn" for example throws up 149,000 results.  Low by all accounts but almost all of the results use the word in the same way, as a past participle of the word "view" in the same way we use "throw" and "thrown", "know" and "known", among others.  The word "rottenous" on the other hand only throws up 153 results when you filter out the TV show Lazy Town which has a character that uses it as their surname - a character which I might add is meant to be a mean and rotten character.  The same justification for viewing it as valid remains, as before, other words establish precedent, "ruin" and "ruinous", "peril" and "perilous", "omen" and "ominous" etc.

I find it fascinating how words like these can persist and be used without actually being documented.  If they were colloquial or regional specific words then I might forgive their obscurity but these words feel like they should be accepted as valid.  Spelling mistakes aside, they do conform to the structure of many other words of similar spellings.  In both cases there are words with similar meanings but none of them fit and can be used in the exact place of those used.