Playing With Words

Sometimes you can get the best ideas for things to either write about or use in your writing (locations, weapons, items, cars, etc.) by finding already preexisting items whether in the real world or in works of fiction, simply by redoing word order and making it an ode to the item from which you borrowed your idea. Take Skyrim for example. They undoubtedly created the Wabberjack from Lewis Carol's "Jabberwocky" poem which came from the preexisting notion of "jabberwock".

Allow me to break this down even further: Lewis Carol's poem "The Jabberwock" is irrelevant to play around with the preexisting "jabberwock" idea of nonsense and irrelevance. The Wabbajack (fictional Skyrim weapon) casts "random" spells that may be completely irrelevant to what you're trying to achieve i.e. defeating an enemy, and may sometimes be non-nonsensical. (i.e. turning a mad crab into a frost troll or a sabertooth cat into a chicken.) Similarly, on a show called Better Off Ted, protagonist character Ted had to create a distraction for his office and wound up coming up with a decoy project that didn't actually exist. He called it: Jabberwocky. When he was eventually instructed to come up with a presentation for this fictional decoy project, the presentation made zero sense and held no meaning for the non-existent context.

So here's my challenge to you: find a preexisting word, mix it up, make it your own, then incorporate it into your writing as an ode to the original word where your idea came from.

Think you're up to the task?