Dr. Goodword is talking about those words people make up within very specific context, not really for broad application by all English speakers–like the word cyberchondriac, intended to mean “a person who believes he is sick because his symptoms appear on a web page.”

“Now the real meaning of cyberchondriac should be ‘stomach governor,'” the doctor says, “for kybernan means ‘to govern’ in Greek while chondria is a Latin word meaning ‘stomach'” Apparently, a hypochondriac is so called because of the greek hupokhondria, which is the stomach or abdomen region and believed to be the “seat of melancholy.”

Who needs an MFA anyway? Alan Ackmann confesses:

It was easy, for me at least, to lose perspective on the real world—the world of non-writers, with their various struggles, joys, and fears—and this distance made it difficult to write about that world. Part of it was the fact that I started my program when I was twenty-two. My real life experience was limited, and it wasn’t getting wider in graduate school, and for a time this made me both self-conscious and defensive. The best writers in my program, I felt, were the ones with ample real-life experience on which to draw, and their stories seemed rich in character and emotional depth, their styles matched perfectly with their subjects. The weaker writers, by contrast, hid behind surface level stereotypes and artistic hijinks, cloaking simple thoughts in pretty words. And as much as I tried to be in the former category, I’m afraid I spent (and, regrettably, still spend) too much of my time in the latter.