The mother of one of my sister's primary school classmates used to wear huge and numerous earrings when she came to pick up her son. Gold hoops, beads that looked like bunches of grapes, diamond studs, loopy chains. I wanted a word to describe what they looked like in her ears: heavy, lobe-dragging, substantial, meaty. It had been a long day, and the best I could come up with was watuung. But it got my point across, once everyone had stopped laughing.
There are loads of books about new coinages of words, websites about new slang terms (Urban Dictionary), or words that exist in one language but not in another (eg Schadenfreude), or even those words that describe seemingly culturally specific concepts (eg saudade). Some coinages last, while some are what are known as nonce formations: a new word invented for a specific moment in someone's life and that never sticks around for long afterwards. I thought it would be interesting then to have a go at coining some words for the 'female experience', some of which seem to be sorely lacking in English. The challenge was outlined in a book about women's rights published in 1996 as part of a series called What's the Big Idea? If I were a teacher, something like this would definitely be on the homework agenda.
Getting your first period: commencements
(a beginning; neutral; neither curse nor blessing)
The female equivalent of 'stud': brightling
(positive connotations of bright, still vaguely horsey to be in-keeping with 'stud')
A word to describe your best girl friend: kindrel
(from 'kindred', also 'kind'; -el because it is often a female ending in French, analogy with 'elle'. 'Kindrette' would sound too diminutive and cutesy and full of washing machines.)
The craving you get for chocolate when you're suffering from PMT: the zeenans
(the noise in your head when you set your teeth and your internal monologue goes "Eeeeeeee I want chocolate")
A woman who doesn't want to get married through her own choice: rectrice
(a tail feather which is important in the flight of birds)
How you might feel if you had been up all night nursing a screaming baby: geschloggered
(quasi-Yiddish/German, a sounds-like-you-feel kind of word)
From What's the Big Idea?: Women's Rights by Victoria Parker (with illustrations by Andrew McIntyre)
I would add womanine to this list too, because feminine has come to mean one particular set of attributes (flowers, daintiness, kittens --- blergh) and has fairly negative connotations, rather than meaning "being a woman", whereas masculine, seems to me to still mean "being a man".
