A story from almost 50 years ago, in Cambridge MA, in which a young woman talks with exasperation about the slapdash housekeeping skills of some male friends of hers sharing an apartment in Cambridge. One of them had done a load of laundry, washing, along with a lot of dark clothes, a brand-new fuzzy yellow garment, with the predictable unfortunate outcome that, as she put it:
*Everything* was covered with little yellow greeblies!
Ann and I hadn’t heard the word greeblies before, but from the context and the word’s sound, it was clear what the greeblies were: little bits of fluff (which attached themselves unwelcomely to other things). And when we told the story to others, no one had any problem dealing with the unfamiliar word.
(Greeblies are relevant in my life right now, because I’m washing my new plush bathrobe, which has shown some tendency to shed the occasional greebly here and there, and has to be washed on its own, not even with other dark-colored clothes, so as not to risk a plague of dark blue greeblies. Not for me the mistake of those guys back in Cambridge.)
And it seems that people have invented this noun (and the similar noun greeble), independently, many times, using the phonosemantic resources of English to craft a new word that vividly suggests the image they have in mind.
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