One of the challenges of every language is the introduction of new words to keep pace with the changes in society. Every change requires new words to meet the resulting needs of society.

At face value, some words appear to have little or nothing to do with what we have come to know and accept as the meaning of those words. A few notable examples would include words like "artery" which has nothing to do with art and "cardiology" which is definitely not the study of card games. Sometimes, we have to depend on the origin of those words help to allay our initial concerns.

This page is dedicated to the introduction of the word filosophie. This is a word that literally popped into my head while I was thinking out aloud in December 2000. I was playing with words and thinking about their relationships with other words and the role they play in our lives.

Sitting in front of a roaring fire my concern was with "little" people in the system and the way some of them are treated. I thought about jobs and family life and various other situations.

Before long, the fire needed tending and I subconsciously reached for the tools to rearrange the wood in the fireplace. As my focus shifted to the fire, it dawned on me that the biggest fire usually starts with a little grain of match. In fact, if matches were the size of great logs, they would be too cumbersome for starting a fire.

Then I remembered that small kindling is used to start a fire. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that "big" things need and depend heavily on "small" things to get started. In fact, many big things were small before they got big.

Needless to say, these thoughts and ideas made for a very interesting awareness. After a short while, I realized that these exciting revelations were destined for obscurity unless I made a concerted effort to share them with others.

Since these thoughts were very informal, I found it very difficult to categorize them. They obviously didn't fall under the umbrella of philosophy but they belonged somewhere. That's when filosophie popped into my head.

I reached for my trusted dictionary and realized that filosophie was not in the English dictionary. I went to my favorite online dictionary and found that there was no match for that word. As usual, the next line read, "Perhaps you meant: filosofie (found in 1 dictionary). It turned out to be Dutch for philosophy.

That's when I thought it would be a good word to represent what I was experiencing - an informal understanding of words, their relationship with other words and the resulting impact on humankind. It would be a pseudonym for philosophy in a quasi-discipline.

For the English Language, I am proposing that the word filosophie be used to represent an informal discipline that allows us to record and share their personal thoughts on any subject. It is understood that some of those thoughts may or may not conform to the norms of society but, for the moment, that is not as important as recording the thoughts of humanity.

Thoughts are conceived in the minds of human beings and to my dismay, the majority of them are not written anywhere. If only one thought conceived in the mind of every human being was recorded, the world would be a much richer place.

Every day, people from all walks of life get together under varying circumstances and share thoughts and stories that are ever so rich. Unfortunately, many of those thoughts and stories are told in bars and street corners and other every day situations. Most of them will never be recorded. They will be relegated to the grave in the mind where it was conceived.

If you embrace these views and wish to support the use of the word filosophie, I would love to hear from you. Please e-mail me to let me know how and where you used it.

As the complexity of society increases in leaps and bounds the need for new words increases exponentially. Change in the 20th Century is probably greater than the change in all the previous centuries put together.

In family life alone, record numbers of divorce, re-marriage and marriage across cultural, social, geographical and other boundaries create the need for countless words to explain the resulting relationships.

For example, words used to explain relationships and activities involving members of the opposite sex may or may not do justice to relationships and activities involving members of the same sex.

Consider the predicament of a teenager, whose parents are now part of a second or third marriage, trying to introduce members of his "new" family to members of his "old" family. What about when they go to visit the uncle who is now in his second marriage.

Technology is another area that created hundreds of new words to explain the many new concepts, tools, products and services that are being introduced at the speed of light. Words like Internet and e-mail and bandwidth just did not have a place in the language of previous generations.

In that arena, society readily accepted a new dimension of language that is based on acronyms like FTP, ISP, USB, VCR, CD, DVD, MP3 and more recently PVR - Personal Video Recorders. We have also accepted "acronyms" for single words e.g. TV for television.

This type of change in the language is also ingrained in the culture of organizations, disciplines and professional fields. We now do business with companies like MBNA Bank, ICI, IBM, DELL and 3M to name a few. A well known one from the medical field is "bid" which I believe means twice a day.

In addition to the new words and terms required for technology, we have the "Net" language which introduced acronyms like FYI - For Your Information; IMHO - In My Humble Opinion; TAA - Take Appropriate Action; LOL - Laughing Out Loud; etc. Countless other can be found on the Internet.

Last but certainly not least, we have many other words and acronyms that belong to specific fields and known as jargon. Some are found in more than one field e.g. in my previous life as a Customs Broker, CIF represented Cost, Insurance and Freight. Today, in the banking industry, it represents Customer Information Folder.