FEATURED NEOLOGISM:

The Spanish neologism veroño caught my attention, a portmanteau word formed from verano + otoño: ver(ano)+(ot)oño (summer + autumn). Veroño is a masculine noun used in informal, spontaneous speech. It refers to the beginning of autumn, between the end of September and the end of October, when the days are sunny and the temperatures are still quite high, almost like summer.

Montserrat López Díaz is a professor of French linguistics at the University of Santiago de Compostela (USC), Spain. Her research focuses on various aspects of lexicon, pragmatics, semiotics, and learning French as a foreign language (FLE). She has worked extensively on euphemistic and dysphemistic discourse, “langue de bois” (wooden slang), and politically correct language. She currently works primarily with corpora to study the impact of politically correct discourse on the creation of new terms. She is interested in politically correct usage, on the one hand, from the perspective of the variety of constructions it establishes within its multiple paradigms, which contradict the principle of linguistic economy, and on the other hand, from the normative activity related to neological prescription and the consequent proscription of lexemes from the standard register that are considered taboo in public discourse. For further information, see the webpage.