The English language has a plethora of good words, but we think it could use more.  Some of these words are already in use, but most have been ignored by lexicographers, who can be notoriously conservative.

crunkle, verb, and crunkled, adjective:  a combination of wrinkled and crumpled.  Usage:  "When he got his test back with an F, he crunkled it up and threw it in the wastebasket."  "Look at that – my dress is all crunkled."

derbis, noun (pronounced "dur-biss"):  a variation on debris (pronounced duh-bree), which hardly anyone spells correctly.  Let's toss the French-based debris and call it "derbis."  Usage:  "Man, people are slobs!  Look at all the derbis on the side of the road."

frack, fracking, all-purpose word:  a substitute for the other f-word.  Many of us still find the increasingly ubiquitous f-word to be too offensive to use.  The new version of the TV series Battlestar Galactica has come up with an alternative that it uses with impunity and apparently without offending.  Usage:  "Oh frack!  The fracking aliens have breached the hull.  Get the frack down here with some blasters immediately."

freshling, noun and adjective:  a person in, or a word designating, the first year of high school or college.  We all want to be politically correct and gender-neutral, don't we?  Well, we use the gender-neutral terms sophomore, junior, and senior to designate students in the second, third, and fourth years of school.  It's time to stop calling first-year students freshmen, when they are, in fact, both men and women.  Usage:  "She's a freshling in college this year."

frumious, adjective:  extremely angry, a combination of furious and fuming.  The word was one of many coined by Lewis Carroll (whose real name was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) in "Jabberwocky," a poem in Through the Looking Glass.  He called it a portmanteau word – a single word formed by merging sounds and meanings of two words.  The phrase "portmanteau word" and one of his coinages (chortle, formed by combining snort and chuckle) made it into the dictionary.  Frumious certainly deserves such an honor.  Usage:  "When I messed up the job, the boss was positively frumious."

gonna, verb:  a variant on going to.  Let's face it:  we purists cannot fight forever against the way people talk.  If they're "gonna" talk that way, there's little we can do about it.  We might as well make gonna a legitimate word.  Usage:  "Some day I'm gonna wring his neck."  (See also:  wanna)

gormit, noun and adjective:  a kind of fish used in cat food.  The can says "gourmet" (pronounced "gor-may"), as in, "Gourmet Seafood Feast," but our cat, Booper, knows this favorite as "gormit(s)."  Usage:  "Hey, Booper – guess what?  You're having gormits tonight."

phartling, noun:  an annoying, misbehaving child.  The term is not original with us but was coined by Florence King, an essayist and National Review columnist.  Usage: "Some phartling was running around and screaming in the restaurant last night, and I wanted to strangle him and his parents." 

slunk, verb:  a variant past tense of slink (it's now accepted in some dictionaries).  It's time to retire slinked, which doesn't have quite the connotation of slunk.  Usage:  "Thoroughly ashamed of himself, he slunk away, vowing never again to ask a woman's age."

smee or itsmee, contracted word:  the answer to the question, "Who's there?" or "Who's this?"  Nobody says, "It is I," and "It is me" is ungrammatical.  Therefore, we need a word to represent what almost everyone says:  "Smee."  ("Hoozere" and "Hoozis" might also be useful additions to the dictionary.)  Usage (obviously):  Q. "Hoozere?"  A. "Smee."

spose and sposeta, verb:  variants on suppose and supposed to.  Very few people sound out the first syllable in suppose, and even fewer pronounce the "d" in supposed to.  We might as well accommodate their slovenly speech.  Usage:  "We're sposeta have a test tomorrow.  Do you spose I could borrow your notes?"

sput, noun (pronounced with short u, as in but):  a short interrupting sound, of the type emitted by a recording or electronic device.  Usage:  "I heard a sput and then the lights went out."  "CDs are better than the old LP records because they are less likely to develop sputs."

squinch, verb:  a portmantaeu word, combining squeeze and pinch.  Normally used with "together."  Usage:  "Squinch those two wires together."  Second meaning – a combination of squint and squinch.  Normally used with "up."  Usage:  "As he she sucked on the lemon, her eyes got all squinched [up]."

squoze, verb (past tense):  an alternate for squeeze.  Squeezed doesn't sound squishy enough, and squooshed sounds too squishy.  Usage:  "I squoze the toothpaste too hard, and it squooshed all over the place."

teenspeak, noun:  the language peculiar to adolescents in any given generation, currently indistinguishable from primitive grunts.  Usage:  "One of your friends called and left a message, but I don't know what it was because it was all teenspeak."

thingee or thingy, noun:  any gizmo for which we do not know the proper name, especially something of a technical nature.  We already have watchamacallit, thingamabob, and thingamajig, but thingee is more economical.  Usage:  "Let's see if we can get this to work by plugging the blue thingee into the black thingee."

vidiot, noun:  a person who watches excessive amounts of TV or is indiscriminate about what he or she watches.  Usage: "Joe is a real vidiot and can be entertained by almost anything on the tube."

wanna, verb:  a replacement for "want to" (see "woulda, coulda, shoulda" below).  Not many people enunciate to in "want to," so let's replace it with wanna.  Usage:  "I wanna kiss you.  You wanna kiss me?"  (See also:  gonna)

woulda, coulda, shoulda, verbs:  replacements for would have, could have, and should have.  Hardly anyone pronounces the word have in these constructions, so most students erroneously write "would of," "could of," and "should of."  These new words would correct that.  Usage:  "I shoulda done the homework; then I coulda got a better grade."

Although I wouldn't add their creations to the dictionary, I've noticed that my students are sometimes more adept at adding to and changing the language than they are at learning it.  I've thought about giving extra credit for "creative spelling."  For instance, recently in an essay about stereotyping gender roles, a student wrote:  "We shouldn't genderalize about boys and girls."

Do you have your own suggestions?  Post them on the Message Board.