You Are the Meeting

Quiet Echo — “You Are the Meeting” Host: Teresa Nikas | Cedar Valley News | September 14, 2026 An editor confesses she is not the guard at the gate of the language; she is half in love with the riffraff. A romp through four ways a word comes alive: misheard into something lovelier (the mondegreen, from Sylvia Wright’s Lady Mondegreen, to the country song heard as “four hundred children”); drifted into its own opposite (nice once meant stupid; awful once meant full of awe); borrowed whole from strangers for a feeling English never named (iktsuarpok); and simply made up, at a kitchen table, or at the top of this very page. Because the word fictorial is itself a coinage, a made-up word about made-up words. Teresa Nikas on why language belongs to no dictionary, and every one of us is making it: the dictionary is only the minutes, and you are the meeting. Write to us. What is your favorite misheard lyric, a word you wish English had, or one your family simply made up? Send a letter to our Letters to the Editor page: https://bit.ly/40p8jKy Get Cedar Valley News free, every morning. Sign up here: https://publicationconsultants.aweb.page/daily-cedar-valley-news Quiet Echo is part of the fictional Cedar Valley News series, written by Evan Swensen, Publisher, and Claude Marshall, AI Developmental Editor. While Teresa and her town are fictional, the words are real. The term mondegreen, for a misheard line, was coined by the writer Sylvia Wright in a 1954 Harper’s essay, “The Death of Lady Mondegreen,” after she misheard “and laid him on the green” as “and Lady Mondegreen” in the traditional ballad “The Bonnie Earl o’ Moray.” The word nice derives from Latin nescius, “ignorant,” and shifted meaning over centuries; awful once meant “full of awe” and silly once meant “blessed,” both well-documented cases of semantic drift. Iktsuarpok is an Inuit (Inuktitut) word often glossed as the restless anticipation of waiting for someone to arrive. Fictorial is a coinage of this series. Sources: the Oxford English Dictionary, Harper’s Magazine, and standard etymological references.