Ludwig Wittgenstein; nonchalant dreadhead

On Ghost Words, Language Games, and Why “Torpify” Doesn’t Exist

Consider this chart. It’s not a bar chart or a pie chart or one of those hellish econometric line graphs that always look like electrocardiograms at a robot funeral, but rather something more quietly harrowing: a visual grid. A lexical spreadsheet. A table of English words so arranged as to highlight their morphological families - torpid, torpor, torpific, torpify. Only the last two don’t exist. Or rather they almost do. They exist enough to be implied, imagined, felt as missing. They are listed in ghost-grey font, italicised or struck-through or simply absent, as if they had been erased by a very shy god. The kind of god who’s not cruel, exactly, but who gets off on denying closure.
You look at candor and candid and find yourself reaching, instinctively, for candify - not out of necessity, mind, but out of a peculiar sort of lexical reflex, a silent inner twitch of semantic logic that says: “Yes. That ought to be a word.” The same way you feel the next beat in a 4/4 measure. The same way you sense the implied third point in a triangle. It’s not just that the form could exist - it’s that it feels like it already does, somehow, in some shadow register of English. The Platonic realm of words.
This is the Phantom Lexicon: the domain of gruntled, chalant, peccable, lucify, torpify, candify, and their countless uninvited siblings. Words that obey every visible rule of derivational morphology. Words whose roots are attested and whose affixes are common currency. Words which, by all rights, should be real - and yet remain nonexistent. They are the conceptual equivalent of phantom limbs: you reach for them, and feel them, and sometimes swear you’ve used them - only to find they’re not there.
This phenomenon isn’t merely amusing or linguistically cute, although it is those things. It’s also, on reflection, profoundly weird. Because if language is - as we are repeatedly told in undergraduate seminars - a shared code for interpersonal meaning, then how can it be that an entire community of fluent users collectively intuits the existence of a word like lucify, only to discover it is not real? If we all agree that it makes sense - morphologically, semantically, even pragmatically - then by what authority is it excluded from the lexicon? Who, exactly, gets to bar the gate? It's a kind of grammatical Mandela Effect, a communal false memory of linguistic possibility. These ghost-words are real enough to feel wrong in their absence. They itch at the edge of expressive need. You feel cheated not to have them.
Take torpify, for instance: as a verb it feels obvious, intuitive - to render someone sluggish or torpid. “His lecture torpified the entire auditorium” has such a crisp syntactic snap that you could almost be forgiven for thinking you’d read it in The Economist. And yet it is not a word. You can’t use it in Scrabble. Microsoft Word will underline it. Your thesis supervisor will ask if it’s a typo. The word is semantically necessary, morphologically plausible, grammatically unobjectionable - and lexically dead-on-arrival. Why?
Why do these non-words feel more internally coherent than half the rubbish that does get dictionary status these days? (See: “hangry”, “glamping”, “yeet”.) Why do they possess such high intuitive legitimacy - that is, why do they feel like words in the absence of actual usage? How can something feel so linguistically valid, so morphologically plausible, so semantically necessary - and yet not be real?
This is not merely a question for language nerds, crossword fanatics, or people who get excited about affixes. It’s a question that touches on the fundamental metaphysics of language - how we know what a word is, what counts as meaning, what the limits of expressibility say about our inner and outer worlds. These ghost-words sit at the crossroads of grammar, logic, and social practice - and they confuse all three. What’s most sinister about them - if you’ll allow the metaphor to metastasise - is that they expose something broken in the way we assume language works. Because if language were a perfect logic-machine, a combinatorial system of transparent roots and affixes, then candify should be just as real as liquefy. But it isn’t. And if language were merely a record of usage, a mirror of what people say, then surely lucify should have shown up by now - because people want to say it. But it hasn’t.
The phenomenon is too subtle to call a glitch. It’s more like a shadow cast by a deeper structure. A faint but persistent artefact of some misalignment between the rules of the system and the way the game is played. And that, in turn, suggests something important: that meaning in language is not just about form, or function, or frequency - but about something else, something harder to pin down.
This essay proposes that the most illuminating way to understand these absent-presences - these should-be words that somehow aren’t - is through the lens of Ludwig Wittgenstein, the Viennese philosopher who spent his entire second career (the later Wittgenstein) dismantling the idea that language is a code for thought. In his posthumous Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein proposed that language is not a static structure or a mirror of ideas, but a series of games - meaning arises not from internal logic or etymological elegance, but from use, from practice, from embeddedness in a life-form. To say it in his idiom: Words are deeds.
We will take this view seriously, and use it to explain why ghost words are not simply “missing” or “uncoined,” but actually unplayed - like moves in a game that, while technically possible, simply never occur because no one knows what they would mean in practice. You can’t just say “candify” into the void and expect the rules to shift around it. You must have a context, a game, a shared set of expectations - and if that scaffolding doesn’t exist, the word remains a kind of grammatical orphan. It doesn’t mean because no one uses it. But before we settle into this Wittgensteinian groove - before we place too much faith in use as the final arbiter of sense - we will take a detour (or four) through some alternative, and equally serious, philosophies of language:
From Ferdinand de Saussure, we’ll borrow the idea of language as a closed system of oppositions, where the value of each term is determined by its difference from others - a view that explains how the absence of words like chalant or lucify might actually generate the rhetorical punch of their surviving counterparts.
From Jacques Derrida, we’ll adopt the notion of différance and the “trace” - meaning as something inherently unstable, deferred, haunted - to show that these ghost-words may not be errors, but structural necessities.
And from Martin Heidegger, we’ll take the proposition that language is not just a tool, but the house of Being, to ask whether certain states of experience remain unnamed - not due to oversight, but because the Being in question has not yet been disclosed.
Each of these detours will deepen the puzzle and sharpen the stakes. But ultimately, we will return - as one always must - to the austere grammar of Wittgenstein’s investigations. His view, enriched by these wanderings, will help us finally answer the question: Why do words that should exist, not exist? And perhaps more unsettlingly: What else are we missing - not because it’s unthinkable, but because we lack the grammar to name it? We begin, then, with the rules of the game.

Here is something that Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote in §43 of his Philosophical Investigations; It’s one of those sentences that feels like it ought to be written on the inside of your skull in Times New Roman size 18 italics: “For a large class of cases - though not for all - in which we employ the word ‘meaning,’ it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language.”
This is the kind of sentence that - and this is important - sounds, at first, either trivially true or hopelessly vague, like one of those faux-profound things yoga instructors say when they forget the Sanskrit. But the longer you sit with it, and especially the longer you try to apply it to actual words (say, candify or lucify or torpify), the more its implications start to smoulder. Like if you left a marshmallow too long in the campfire and now it’s both sticky and on fire and also somehow beautiful. Because what Wittgenstein is doing here - and this is very much his M.O. in the Investigations, which is basically a book-length process of very politely but very thoroughly undoing the idea that language is a naming system or code - is attempting to deflate our entire sense of how words work. Not as labels. Not as containers of meaning. But as moves in a game. Like when someone shouts “Check!” in chess: it doesn’t refer to anything, exactly - it does something. It invokes a rule, alters a condition, creates a new set of responses.
So what does this mean for a word like torpify? Because torpify is a beautiful little neologism. It sits there with all the confidence of a real English verb - tidy root, Latin-derived stem, predictable suffix. It belongs to a whole family of siblings: torpor, torpid, even torpefied (a kind of Frankenstein form that shows up in old texts like a footnote that learned to walk). And its meaning is, by all accounts, utterly transparent: to cause to become torpid. To dull. To deaden. To slow the metabolic fire of a person’s presence. “That lecture torpified me.” It works. We get it. And yet it’s not a word.
Or more precisely: it’s not a move. It’s not in the game. No native speaker reaches for it. Oxford won’t print it. It may be playable in Words With Friends, depending on your luck and your opponent’s cowardice, but in the grander language-game of English, it’s off the board.
And here’s where Wittgenstein’s move is both extremely liberating and slightly maddening. Because he doesn’t care about potentiality. He doesn’t say: “This word would make sense if people used it.” He says: If people don’t use it, then it doesn’t mean. Not can’t mean. Doesn’t. The whole metaphysical panic attack about “Should this be a word?” disappears once you accept that words don’t mean in isolation - they mean in context, as practice, as social behaviour embedded in life.
This is the point where someone - probably a very clever and self-assured undergrad - will say something like: “But torpify obeys all the morphological rules. Doesn’t that make it a valid word-in-waiting?” To which Wittgenstein’s ghost (and maybe also his actual living self, depending on how metaphysics works for you) would say: “Ah. But grammar is not logic.”
Which means: just because something is logically well-formed - just because you can parse it, construct it, even feel it - doesn’t mean it has sense. Sense comes from practice. From convention. From use. From someone actually saying it in a way that lands.
Let’s say, for example, you invent a new chess piece. It’s shaped like a crescent moon. It’s carved out of a very tasteful ivory substitute. You’ve decided it can move in a perfect triangle: three squares right, three squares up, then three squares back diagonally, returning to its origin. It’s geometrically elegant. Balanced. Non-redundant. You could give it a name - the Calyx, say - and even write up a whole Wikipedia article about it and include an ASCII diagram showing its move pattern. And yet…
You bring it to your local chess club and attempt to deploy it in a real game, and people laugh at you. Or stare blankly. Or tell you to piss off. Because it’s not part of the game. It doesn’t matter how mathematically valid the piece is. It doesn’t matter that it doesn’t break any rules of movement. It’s not that it’s wrong - it’s that it isn’t played. And this is what candify is. What lucify is. What torpify is.
Not nonsense, exactly. But a non-move. A piece that hasn’t been given rules. A phantom in the linguistic algorithm. You might intuit what it’s supposed to do - it has shape, posture, semantic vibe - but it hasn’t been played, and therefore it hasn’t been seen, and therefore it hasn’t been meaningful.
The meaning of a word is its use in the language. And if there’s no use - no uptake, no practice, no shared understanding of when to say it and what effect it will have - then there’s no meaning. This is not (and Wittgenstein is at pains to point this out) a limitation. It’s a description. He’s not saying torpify is invalid. He’s saying: your belief in its validity is based on a model of language that doesn’t actually map to how language works.
Because the old model - the model he’s dismantling - is that language is a naming system. That each word is a little tag you attach to a thing, and that communication is just a matter of lining up the tags in the right order. This is the picture of language you inherit (sometimes unconsciously) from childhood, from Latin, from textbooks, from Augustine, and from an unholy amount of online discourse. It’s seductive. It makes language feel orderly. Knowable. Programmable. But it’s not true.
What Wittgenstein is trying to get us to see is that language is more like a form of life - a thing people do, together, according to patterns and instincts and rituals that are not purely rational but are nonetheless rule-bound. Language is less like Lego and more like dancing: you can invent a new move, but unless someone else mirrors it - unless the community absorbs it - you’re just flailing around alone, which brings us back to the phantom lexicon.
When you say candify, you are - in Wittgensteinian terms - attempting to make a move in a language-game that hasn’t been invented yet. The word has the form of a verb. It sounds like a verb. It should, by all rights, mean something like “to make candor” or “to imbue with candidness.” But there’s no context for this. No game. No uptake. No use. You’re holding the Calyx piece over the board, wondering why no one recognises its geometry.
Words only mean if they do work. If they act. If they change the state of the board. And until torpify or lucify or peccable starts doing that - until people start using them in sentences, telling jokes with them, getting into fights about them, writing them in love letters and parking fines and Post-It Notes - they remain ghosts. Not errors. Not mistakes. Just non-moves. Pieces no one knows how to play. So: candify is not wrong. It’s just unplayed.
And once you accept that - once you begin to see language as a system of acts rather than a system of names - you begin to stop asking “Why doesn’t this word exist?” and instead start asking “What kind of life would make this word meaningful?” And that - that movement from form to function, from logic to practice - is what Wittgenstein means by use.
And it’s where our inquiry begins.

Let’s say you’re standing in a bright white kitchen. It’s early-ish in the morning. There’s a moka pot burbling on the hob and some faintly oppressive Radio 4 programme murmuring from the other room - one of those grim 9:00 a.m. episodes about climate anxiety or state funerals or council tax uprisings - and you’re trying to describe, aloud, to no one in particular, the experience of reading a certain kind of prose. Prose that’s airy and clean and absolutely unburdened by ornament. Something like Orwell’s Why I Write, or Sontag’s Notes on Camp, or, if you’re really riding the clarity train, maybe even the early chapters of Strunk & White. And you say - perhaps with the last syllable trailing into your coffee - “It’s just… lucid. So lucid.”
And that’s the end of it. Because in that moment, lucid is doing its job. It’s not a half-formed step in a grammatical supply chain. It’s not an affix-fodder noun waiting to be verbed. It’s the whole act. The move, complete. Full stop.
Which is why, if some dude were to respond - eyes bleary, milk in hand - “Yeah man, totally lucified,” you’d probably feel a sudden, inexplicable itch behind the eyes. Not because you don’t understand what they mean (you do, kind of). Not because the formation is grammatically broken (it isn’t). But because something about it feels off. Misplaced. Culturally tone-deaf. Like using the word “epiphany” to describe a flat white. What you’re feeling - and this is where Wittgenstein starts smiling, maybe even gloating, from somewhere in the Philosophical Afterlife - is a category error. The sense that someone has tried to make a valid linguistic move in the wrong game.
See, in Wittgenstein’s post-1950 brainworld - the one he staked his afterlife on after recanting much of the early Tractatus, i.e. after coming down from the mountain and renouncing the idea that language was a mirror of reality, and instead insisting that it was a series of interlocking, overlapping, and maddeningly local “games” - meaning is not just a function of syntax or logic or even intention. It is a matter of fit. Of social function. Of how a word behaves within a form of life. Which means that if you take a word like lucid, which lives happily as an adjective in a discourse-world of clarity, light, and mental coherence, and try to force it into the verb slot (lucify, lucified, lucifying), you’re not inventing new meaning. You’re misplaying the game. You’re trying to dunk in badminton.
Or, to extend Wittgenstein’s own analogies (see §23–27, where he outlines the idea of a “language-game” as a family of rule-bound activities: giving orders, describing shapes, requesting items, making jokes, praying, cursing, etc.), you are confusing the rules of one with the rules of another. You are assuming that because you know how to play Scrabble, you’re good at Monopoly. Or worse - that you’ve invented a great new Scrabble word by borrowing a move from Cluedo.
“It is like a wheel that can be turned though nothing else moves with it,” Wittgenstein says, describing not a grammatical error but a kind of performative irrelevance - a sentence that makes internal sense but doesn’t connect to the world. Lucify is this kind of wheel.
Why is liquefy fine and lucify isn’t? Why do we solidify, vitrify, clarify, but not candify or gentilify or lucify?
And here the temptation is to say something morphological and clever - like: liquid is a physical state that can change form, therefore it demands a processual verb, whereas lucid is a state of perception or clarity and therefore doesn’t “want” to be verbed. But that’s not enough. Because clarify works, and clarity is not a substance. Nor is beautify, and beauty is about as metaphysical and non-liquid as things get. So the explanation has to go deeper. It has to involve the use-case. The context. The form of life.
Here’s the thing: lucid is already maximally performative in its adjective form. You say it to describe, to praise, sometimes even to warn (e.g., “He’s gone lucid again,” in psychiatric contexts). It’s anchored in a domain where what matters is the state - not the process. Not the transition. Not the becoming. Just the being.
The language-game of lucid is thus what we might call snapshot-based. It captures a quality of mind or expression as it is, without needing to narrate its transformation. There is no pressure, in our actual speech patterns, to say how something became lucid. The only question is whether it is. Like an on-off switch. Lucid or not. There’s no need for a gradient verb which means: when you try to lucify something, you’re importing a conversion model from a different game. Probably from chemistry or materials science or theology - domains where things regularly move from one state to another via named mechanisms: vitrify (glassify), liquefy (melt), sanctify (make holy), clarify (make clear). Clarity is not lucidity, and even if it were, the game doesn’t need the move.
Even if a word could exist (by rules of morphology, analogy, or semantic necessity), it doesn’t play unless the language-game has a slot for it. The move has to fit into a shared activity. There must be a context - not just a possible utterance, but a cultural demand. A use. Imagine someone builds a perfect new key. Beautiful. Ergonomic. Brushed metal. Laser-engraved. It feels right in the hand. You can imagine it opening something. But there’s no lock. No door. No mechanism anywhere in your world that requires it. It is, in a very literal sense, useless. Not broken. Not ugly. Just unneeded. Lucify is that key.
So when people try to use these ghost words - whether as jokes, puns, coinages, or serious attempts at lexical engineering - they are not violating any structural rules. They are simply misapplying a model. They are treating language like Lego, forgetting that it’s closer to chess. Or maybe jazz. (Jazz with committee-voted rules, enforced by Microsoft Word Processing).
Which brings us back to category error. In philosophy, a category error is when you take a concept from one domain and apply it where it doesn’t belong. Like asking “What colour is democracy?” Or “What does the number four smell like?” Or “Why can’t we lucify this paragraph?” These aren’t stupid questions - they’re questions that misunderstand the rules of the game. They treat types as interchangeable when they’re not. They assume that meaning flows downhill from form. But it doesn’t. Meaning rises up from use. It only matters in context.
So when we say that lucify is a category error, we mean that the very act of trying to use it treats the language-game of lucid as though it obeys the same affordances as liquid or solid or vapid. But it doesn’t. The word lucid lives in a game where the verb form is not just absent - it’s unnecessary. The light is either on or it isn’t. There’s no dimmer switch. And this - this epistemic modesty, this refusal to assume that words can be extended at will - is the core of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy.
The implications are enormous and kind of terrifying if you’re someone who likes to believe in universal logic or linguistic neatness. Because it means that the rules aren’t rules in the formal sense - they’re more like rituals. Patterns of play. Inherited behaviours. They arise from precedent, tradition, social coordination. And once they’re in place, they resist logic. They don’t evolve through deduction. They evolve through habit, repetition, small shifts in tone and uptake.
Words like candify, lucify, torpify are not missing from English because they’re malformed or incorrect. They are missing because no one plays them. Their absence is not a bug in the system - it is part of the system. A game with unused pieces. A dance with no need for that step. And if you want to introduce them - really introduce them, not just as jokes or portmanteaux or novelty - then you have to change the game. Not the grammar. The game.

Let’s take a small detour. We’ve been talking rules and games and practice and the anti-Platonism of late Wittgenstein (whose whole project was, arguably, to dismantle the fantasy that language hovers over reality like a hovering drone with a perfect HD camera, neutrally recording), but to understand why some words feel like they should exist even though they don’t - not just don’t yet, but don’t in some deeper, system-level, lexicon-wide, structure-preserving way - we have to go back to Geneva, ca. 1916, to Ferdinand de Saussure.
Saussure, who taught linguistics at the University of Geneva with the kind of charisma that makes students take furious notes even when they don’t really understand what’s going on (notes which, in fact, formed the basis of his posthumously published Cours de linguistique générale, a fact which is kind of hilarious when you remember that Saussure himself never wrote a book), gave us what we now call structuralism which, if you strip away all the French theory scaffolding and the translation woes and the late-night-in-theory-bar performativity of it all, boils down to this one seismic insight: A linguistic sign is arbitrary.
Which doesn’t sound like much, right? It sounds like the kind of thing you might mumble if you were trying to sound smart at a dinner party where someone was going off about etymology. But what Saussure meant - and what makes the idea revolutionary - is that the connection between a word (the signifier) and its meaning (the signified) isn’t natural. It’s not logical. It’s not ordained. There is no necessary reason that the word dog refers to that particular tail-wagging, piss-scented, joy-exploding quadruped. It’s just a convention.
Worse: it’s a systemic convention. Which is to say: words don’t mean in isolation. They mean by contrast. They mean because of what they’re not. Language, in Saussure’s model, is like a vast relational grid - a kind of giant, high-dimensional Venn diagram drawn in negative space - where each sign gets its identity not from its substance, but from the fact that it’s different from other signs.
Dog means dog because it’s not log or bog or god. Red means red because it’s not blue or green or communist or dead. The entire lexicon is a system of distinctions. There is no meaning without contrast. Nothing exists alone. Which brings us back - finally - to our haunted house of phantom words. Torpify. Lucify. Candify. And, most famously, chalant.
Because nonchalant, as every schoolchild with a poetic ear and a mild sense of injustice has noticed, feels suspicious. The non- prefix implies an opposition, a negation, a subtractive relationship - which, according to the logical-morphological instincts you’ve had since you were six and first learned what disappear meant, must mean that somewhere out there, in the Platonic realm of uncontracted language, there exists a corresponding chalant. And it makes a kind of intuitive sense, right? You can picture a chalant person. Someone who is concerned, invested, visibly attentive. Maybe a bit tense. The sort of person who wipes the table before sitting down. A man who buttons his shirt to the top even when no tie is involved. A woman who responds to emails with “Just looping back!” and means it. Someone who takes things seriously. Who chalantly cares.
But of course there is no such word. The chalant never comes. The prefix is a false flag. The opposition is fake. There’s only nonchalant, standing there like a bluff in a poker game - a move that gains its power precisely because the opposite card was never dealt. Which, if you’re Saussure, makes perfect sense. Because nonchalant doesn’t mean by pointing to an actual opposite. It means by contrast within the system. Its effectiveness as a word - its semantic vibe, its aesthetic crispness, even its faint whiff of Continental cool - depends not on the presence of chalant, but on its absence. In other words: chalant doesn’t exist because it can’t. Or more accurately, because its nonexistence sharpens the meaning of nonchalant. The absence makes the presence sparkle.
This is what Saussure meant when he said that the lexicon is a closed system - not “closed” as in no new words can be added, but “closed” in the way a circuit is closed: meaning is produced by the flow of contrast. Add the wrong new node - say, chalant - and the voltage changes. The energy dissipates. The joke stops being funny. The word loses its edge.
Another example, more modern and memeified: gruntled. You’ve seen it. “I’m feeling quite gruntled today,” someone tweets, with the smug thrill of someone who thinks they’re being funny and original. But here’s the twist: gruntled is a real word. It’s just obsolete. It meant “pleased” or “satisfied” back in the 18th century, and it vanished for reasons that are probably more to do with phonetics and poetic fashion than with systemic logic. And its return - or half-return - in ironic usage doesn’t actually restore the system. It pokes fun at it. It reminds us that the lexicon is a weirdly curated museum of ghosts and taxidermied roots and prefixes wandering around unattached. It’s a structure, not an essence.
Which is the key thing for Saussure: language isn’t built on natural meaning. It’s a system of arbitrary signs, arranged in such a way that their interrelationships produce significance. So when we ask “Why doesn’t lucify exist?” we’re implicitly assuming that words emerge by logic. That the system ought to permit it. That the morphemes align and therefore the word should appear, like a Pokémon summoned under the right moon phase. You’re mistaking logic for structure.
Lucify doesn’t exist not because it’s malformed - but because the system doesn’t need it. It already has clarify. It already has illuminate. It has enlighten, explain, express clearly, make plain. The slot is filled. The contrast-grid has no hole in that spot. And maybe, just maybe, the absence of lucify - like the absence of chalant - is doing semiotic work. It feels like it should exist precisely because its nonexistence produces a sense of deliberate withholding. Of the ineffable. Of a word that’s missing on purpose.
This is the deep structure of language. Not a toolkit. Not a logic board. But a kind of social aurora - a glow produced by what is said and what is not. What is allowed and what is ruled out not by grammar but by differentiation. Like one of those paintings where the shape is defined by the negative space around it. Of course, Saussure stops here. He gives us the architecture. The framework. The map of contrasts. But he doesn’t tell us how these signs behave in practice. He doesn’t talk about how they’re learned, or played, or internalised. He doesn’t give us the street-level rules of actual linguistic use.
Which is where Wittgenstein steps back in. Because if Saussure gives us the structure, Wittgenstein gives us the rules-of-play. The grammar-not-as-logic. The social choreography of how and when and why we say things. Saussure would say that words are differential nodes in a sign system. But Wittgenstein would ask: Which system? Who plays it? And when?
Contrast alone isn’t enough. Candify and lucify and torpify don’t just fail because they’re structurally redundant. They fail because no one plays them. Because the form of life in which they might have made sense… doesn’t exist. Or hasn’t yet. Or no longer does.
So we can say, tentatively, that Wittgenstein and Saussure are not rivals but mirror-lanterns. Saussure shows how signs mean by difference. Wittgenstein shows how that difference only matters when someone uses it - in a game, in life, with stakes. Chalant isn’t a missing word. It’s a systemic ghost - a gap that glows precisely because it can’t be filled. Lucify is a move in a game that was never invented. And the fact that you feel it ought to be real? That itch, that sense of absence - that’s the system talking back. Which, if nothing else, should make you stop and wonder: what else in your life feels logically necessary but only because the structure made you believe in the gap?

Derrida’s entire project, if you wanted to be cheeky and absurdly reductive about it - and let’s face it, that’s sort of the only way to approach post-structuralism without collapsing into a trembling undergraduate heap of footnotes and crisis-of-meaning-induced dizziness - is to take Saussure’s structuralism and press the haunt button. To say: yes, yes, yes, signs are defined by differences, by contrast, by structural oppositions - but also, and here’s the part where your eyebrows begin to hover slightly above your head, every sign is haunted by what it isn’t. Haunted, not in the Scooby-Doo, chain-rattling, portrait-eyes-following-you sense, but in the deep, pre-modern, Old-World-philosopher-sitting-in-a-cellar-drinking-red-wine-with-Hegel sense: haunted by traces, by absences, by the thing-that-was-never-there-but-somehow-still-leaves-a-mark.
This is différance. (Yes, with an a, which makes no phonetic difference in French but introduces an orthographic one, i.e., it can’t be heard, only seen, which is part of the point.) Différance is deferral and difference simultaneously. It means that meaning is never fully present - it is always postponed, always just out of reach, always becoming, never quite being. Let’s try this through example, lest we fall into exactly the kind of semantic mousetrap Derrida delights in setting for his readers. Take the word terrific; on the face of it, you know what it means: great, awesome, excellent. A good thing. If someone says “You did a terrific job,” you smile. But buried in the etymology - like a corpse under the foundation of a posh hotel - is the fact that terrific used to mean terrifying. The root is terror. It meant something so intense it induced awe, fear, trembling. And so, naturally, your brain itches: if terrific comes from terror, where is terrid? The opposite of horrid. The calm inverse of terrific. The structurally necessary counterweight. Where is the peaceful adjective that terrific negates? Shouldn’t it be terrid? You invent it, unconsciously. “The weather was terrid - mild, boring, safe”. You sense its absence. Not as an accident, but as something necessary.
But Derrida would say: of course it’s absent. Necessarily absent. Because terrific only means what it does - in all its ironic twist, in all its semantic detachment from its etymology - by carrying the trace of the meaning it displaced. Its current meaning is not a new layer of paint over the old one; it’s the ghost of the old one speaking through the paint. The word is not free of its past. It depends on its past - on what it’s not - in order to mean what it now means. And so, terrid doesn’t exist not because we forgot it. Not because the Academy overlooked it. Not because some dictionary editor had a long lunch and missed the update. It doesn’t exist because terrific works better with its ghost. The word gets its emotional punch - its strange and delicious energy - from being a kind of linguistic revenant. It means precisely because it doesn’t sit cleanly in its logic grid. Because the opposite is missing. The absence is a condition of presence.
That’s the Derridean reversal. The Big Move. The thing that makes his whole philosophy either electrifying or exasperating depending on how much French theory you’ve already endured in your short and fragile life. The idea that presence is never pure. That meaning is never complete. That every word is marked, from the moment it’s born, by the things it is not, and cannot be, and refuses to say. The ghost lives in the structure. The margin is inside the centre. Which means - and this is where the Phantom Lexicon stops being a clever parlour trick and starts to become something genuinely unsettling - that our desire for these words, these missing forms (candify, lucify, torpify, terrid, gruntled, chalant), is not a bug in the system. It is the system. The ghost-word is the price we pay for clarity. Every meaning has a shadow. Every sign carries a trace of what it excludes - and that trace is part of its meaning. Derrida doesn’t mourn this. He revels in it. He wants us to get lost in the maze, to see that the very idea of “a final meaning” is a mirage we chase to make ourselves feel stable in a world where meaning is always moving. Which brings us back, yet again to Wittgenstein.
Because Wittgenstein would have read Derrida’s différance and probably sighed the sort of deep, spiritual sigh that sounds like a kettle boiling in reverse. Not because he would have disagreed. Not exactly. He might even have nodded at the idea of meaning as difference, and the haunting of signs by their non-signs. But he would have said: look. Look at how people use language. Not how they theorise about it. Not what they claim it means. Look at what they do.
Wittgenstein would say that the phantom word isn’t a trace of metaphysical absence - it’s just a move no one makes. You can imagine it, sure. You can invent it, coin it, deploy it, slap it on a T-shirt. But if no one picks it up, if no one repeats it, if it doesn’t become part of the game, then it’s not a failure of meaning. It’s just a non-event.
And he might go further: all this Derridean tracing and haunting and playing with absence? That’s not a discovery. That’s a category error. You’re mistaking the deep weirdness of philosophical description for the ordinary competence of everyday life. People get by with language. They don’t need to be told they’re haunted by traces. They just use the words that work.
Derrida wants to haunt the lexicon - to show that words are never pure, never stable, always trembling with deferred possibility. Wittgenstein wants to bring us back to earth - to remind us that language is a public act.
And the Phantom Lexicon sits between them like a séance in a courtroom. Lucify feels like it should exist. That feeling is a trace, a structure, a ghost - and also, simultaneously, a non-move in a language game. A gesture no one makes. A tool without a handle. The ghost is real. But only if you need it. Only if someone plays it. And maybe that’s the real haunting of language: not that some words are missing, but that they might never be needed. That our desire for them is just that - desire. A spectral longing for an order that never promised us logic to begin with.

This is the point where we need to bring in Martin Heidegger, who probably refused to read this essay on the grounds that it smells too much like “ontic prattle” or “the chatter of the public realm,” but who would, nonetheless, have something uniquely urgent to say about the whole phantom word problem. Heidegger’s basic thesis, if you can call something so all-encompassing “basic,” is this: Language is not just a means of communication. It is the site where Being reveals itself. And if you think that sounds unnecessarily capitalised and German, you’re right, but also that’s kind of the point. For Heidegger, the point of language is not to label objects or signal intent or facilitate brunch reservations - it is to disclose the structure of Being. Language is how Being comes into presence.
Language is not a mirror of thought, or a code for ideas, or even a communal tool (pace Wittgenstein) - but instead a kind of metaphysical aperture through which reality reveals itself. Take this passage from On the Way to Language: “Language is the house of Being. In its home man dwells. Those who think and those who create with words are the guardians of this home.”
It means that when a word is spoken - truly spoken, spoken as meant - it doesn’t just describe reality. It brings it forth. Which leads to a different reading of the Phantom Lexicon altogether. Going back, let's assume that torpify is not just a clever coinage or a missed opportunity or a logical derivative of torpid waiting for an editor with courage. Let’s suppose that torpify names a real, felt, phenomenological experience. A mood, or a Stimmung, in Heideggerese. Something not reducible to fatigue or laziness or boredom or sedation - but its own thing. If that’s the case, and the word still doesn’t exist, then Heidegger would say: Being has not yet revealed it. The experience exists, yes - but it has not yet entered language. And until it does, we remain somehow alienated from it - inarticulate, caught in the Not-Yet-Said.
This matters, because for Heidegger, what cannot be said cannot be fully known. We may feel torpified. We may endure it, resist it, even talk around it. But without the word, the experience remains ontologically dim. The light hasn’t hit it yet. And so we remain, in a sense, estranged from our own being. We move through modes of life for which our language has no name - and therefore, no home.
For Heidegger, to be is to dwell in the openness of Being - and to dwell means to speak. To speak means to make space for something to appear. And if the word is missing - or worse, if it has been deliberately excluded, marked as “non-standard” or “unofficial” or “silly” - then the experience it would have disclosed is also missing, in the sense that it hasn’t been welcomed into the clearing. It hasn’t been given its due.
So when we say that candify or lucify or gruntle feel “missing,” Heidegger might say: they are missing because we haven’t dwelt in them yet. Their absence isn’t arbitrary. It is ontological latency. Their meanings haven’t arrived because the world hasn’t needed them enough. Because we haven’t listened.
Let’s try a concrete version of this. Say there is a kind of generosity - a kind of quietly anonymous, bureaucratic, institutional generosity - like the feeling of someone who refills the office kettle without being asked. Not saintly. Not self-sacrificing. Just steadily responsible in the face of entropy. And say we lack a word for that kind of goodness. The closest we have is dutiful, but that’s too dry. Kind is too emotional. Reliable doesn’t touch the moral grace. Maybe there should be a word - kettleness? refusity? thermograce? Something you could say that would let the thing shine. But we don’t have it.
And so, per Heidegger, that moral reality is unspoken. We live in a world full of acts we don’t know how to praise. Because our lexicon lags behind our experience. Because Being hasn’t yet revealed that part of itself in a way we can name. Which, finally, brings us back - surprise! - to Wittgenstein.
Wittgenstein would disagree entirely, but because he’d regard all this talk of “Being” and “revelation” and “ontological latency” as a kind of conceptual indigestion. The kind of thing that happens when philosophers confuse what’s possible to say with what’s meaningful to say. He’d say: yes, sure, we sometimes lack the words. But the question is not whether there’s a hidden truth waiting to be named. The question is whether we can use that word in a way that makes sense to others. Whether it does anything. Whether it plays.
For Wittgenstein, meaning doesn’t arise from the structure of Being. It arises from use in a form of life. You can imagine torpify all you like. You can describe the experience. You can even claim that it’s real and neglected and ontologically orphaned. But unless someone actually says it - and someone else understands it - and a third person corrects its usage at a pub while gesturing with a pint - it doesn’t mean.
The difference between Heidegger and Wittgenstein is not metaphysical but temperamental. Heidegger mourns the unsaid. Wittgenstein shrugs and asks if anyone's using it. One listens for the silence beneath speech; the other listens for what people are actually doing when they speak. In that tension - between revelation and practice - lies the entire problem of the Phantom Lexicon. These missing words might correspond to real experiences. They might name real moods. They might, in Heidegger’s sense, wait for their hour to be spoken. But until someone plays the move - and someone else nods - they remain ontological drafts. Ghosts of possible speech. Not errors. Not nonsense. Just not-yet-dwelt-in.

Let’s now return to the impulse that began this whole essay - that flicker of certainty, that this should be a word. It is the beginning of the problem. Or at least the beginning of our misunderstanding of the problem. Because it leads us to believe that language is incomplete in some way. That its architecture has missing bricks. And that if we just looked hard enough, or spoke precisely enough, or thought purely enough, we could make the system whole. Wittgenstein had a name for this impulse. He called it the craving for generality. And he thought it was a sort of philosophical pathology - the mistaken belief that everything has to be orderly, systematic, categorial. That every word should fit neatly into a diagram, that every concept should resolve into a tree or a taxonomy or a grammar rule that never breaks. That if we just cleaned things up - swept away the mess and fuzz and corner-cases - we could live in a world where words behave like equations.
This is, of course, seductive. Especially to a certain kind of mind. Especially to the kind of person who grew up memorising affixes and playing with root words like Lego. Especially to the kind of student who finds joy in pattern and solace in symmetry. Because if nonchalant is a word, then chalant should be too, dammit. If disgruntled exists, surely gruntled must also roam the fields of possibility, grazing quietly on semantic grass. It’s only fair. But here’s the thing. Here’s what Wittgenstein knew, and what makes him at once frustrating and liberating and vaguely parental in his late style: language is not fair.
It’s not symmetrical. It’s not clean. It’s not even logical, not really. It’s accreted. Built up like barnacles on a ship, unevenly, weirdly, with gaps and protrusions and the occasional mollusc still clinging on. It’s historical. Eccentric. It’s full of idioms and misfires and semantic dead ends. It’s more like a city than a spreadsheet. A city whose streets were laid down by horses and cartwheels and land disputes, not urban planners with top-down views.
So what does that mean for these phantom words - these lucify, candify, torpify, gruntled, chalant type constructions that tug at us like phantom limbs? It means they are not missing. It means they’re not holes in the lexicon. They’re not broken bits of the system that need fixing. They are ghosts of our craving for order. They are what happens when we mistake the rules we’ve internalised - affixes, stems, constructions, syntax trees - for reality itself. Phantom words are not mistakes in language. They are mistakes in our expectations of language.
And Wittgenstein is the philosopher who tells us to let go of the expectation. To stop asking what a word means in isolation, what rule it follows or violates. He tells us to look instead at how it’s used. To ask what game it’s part of. What form of life it fits into. If the game doesn’t need the word, then the word isn’t missing - it was never wanted.
This is the final, slightly devastating insight of the whole affair. The reason candify doesn’t exist is not because of some linguistic oversight or grammatical prejudice. It’s because no one has ever needed to candify anything. Not in any way that couldn’t be done better with sweeten or sugar-coat or glaze or caramelise. Not in any way that made people reach, over and over, for a single, compact, verbified version of candy-making-as-mood-metaphor. And so it never stuck. Never got traction. Never earned its passport into the little republic of usage. That's the rule that actually governs language: use, not logic. Social function, not formal structure. What gets said, not what could be said.
This is not a flaw in language. This is a clue to how language works. Stop looking for the missing piece. Look at the game. Look at the people playing. Look at the life behind the words. That’s where the meaning is.
And if there’s no life for torpify, no game that needs lucify, no moment that cries out for chalant - then there is no lack.

After all the wandering - through logic and morphology and the haunted hallways of différance, through kitchens and chess clubs, past all the linguistic revenants twitching behind the lexicon’s walls - we arrive at something almost childishly simple. Something that sounds, at first, like it might be disappointing. Like it might cheapen all the mystery and shadow and gorgeous spectral theory that’s come before.
But it doesn’t. It clarifies it. Not in the way that lucify never quite manages to - not by reducing or resolving - but by framing. By stepping back and seeing that the mystery is not a problem to be solved but a condition to be understood.
The question was: Why do words like candify, lucify, torpify - words that feel so morphologically right, so semantically poised, so syntactically obedient - not exist? And the answer is: because language doesn’t care what feels right. It cares what plays.
Because language, at bottom, isn’t an ideal structure or a mirror of the world or a crystallisation of thought. It is a set of shared games. It is ritualised behaviour with a syntax. It is people doing things with words, and other people recognising the moves. And if a move isn’t recognised - if it doesn’t land, doesn’t catch, doesn’t ripple outwards in use - then it isn’t a move. It’s just a gesture. A twitch. A key with no lock. This doesn’t mean those ghost-words aren’t beautiful. Or useful. Or even necessary. It just means they aren’t real - yet. Or maybe ever. Because the world, like the lexicon, has no obligation to complete your diagram. There is no divine grammar waiting to be discovered. No perfect morphological jigsaw where every piece will one day slot in. There is only what is said. And what is understood.
So the next time you feel that itch - the soft semantic phantom-pain of a word that isn’t there but should be, the instinctive twitch toward torpify or lucify or candify - don’t reach for the dictionary. Don’t try to birth the word by sheer etymological will. Don’t go spelunking through corpora or etymology sites or marginalia looking for retroactive justification. Instead, look around. Ask what game you’re playing. Ask whether anyone else at the table would nod. Ask whether the word does anything here, now, in this particular form of life.
And if not? Let it drift. Let it haunt. Let it hover in that half-lit linguistic purgatory where unused words go to glow. Because sometimes the silence is the meaning. Sometimes the absence is the point. Sometimes, the most eloquent thing a language can say… is nothing.