A friend and I were talking recently and he surprised me by saying I had created a neologism.

A neologism, if you don’t happen to know, is a new word. The word in this instance was “assumably,” which is a perfectly acceptable adverb and not new at all.

I demurred, but didn’t push the point. This guy is a lawyer and arguing with him is always a losing battle. He’s also no stranger to neologisms himself. He once referred to a case going to an appeals court as the “slamdunkiest” one he’d seen in a long time.

“Humongous” is a neologism you’ve probably heard. It means “huge” and the dictionary says it came into being — or at least was officially recognized — in 1967. I can remember a newspaper publisher, in the 1980s, asking me what I meant when I described something as humongous. He’d never heard the word before.

There are also neologisms that exist only within a family. “Enormal” comes to mind. One of my kids, when very young, referred to something — actually it was someone’s head — as “enormal,” meaning exceptionally large. I loved it and I perpetuated it. So now when you hear me describe something as enormal, you’ll have an inkling.

A neologism doesn’t have to be a single word. It also can be a phrase or expression.

We had a discussion at the office recently about a neologism that appeared in a story that morning.

The subject quoted referred to marginalized families as “the parakeet in the well.” Nobody had heard of the expression, and we all agreed that it probably was a corruption of the “canary down the coal mine,” meaning a guinea pig that society is willing to sacrifice.

There also was a story recently that referred to “the elephant in the kitchen,” which is a variant of “the elephant in the room,” meaning something that everyone is aware of but no one wants to talk about.

How the elephant got from the room to the kitchen is a mystery to me, but I’m thinking elephant in the bathroom makes more sense because the expression is meant to convey an obvious and uncomfortable truth.

So please join in my crusade. Always opt for the elephant in the bathroom.

Irv Dean is the Gazette’s city editor. Contact him at dean@dailygazette.com.