The nice thing about being a foreigner in a country like Bulgaria where the chances that someone you'd meet in everyday life and with whom you share a common language are fairly slim, is that you have to make a real effort to learn the local language. It is hard to get away with mediocrity.

As hard and frustrating as it is to learn Bulgarian in the beginning, all that effort is rewarded when you start to understand playfulness in a language and the way new words can be formed in it.

A Bulgarian website that I've come to enjoy very much lately is [http://kvokvo.com], as of recently also available under its Bulgarian domain [http://neolog.bg].

The Bulgarian "кво" is a fairly rude form of какво (kakvo), meaning "what?". The site's original address could roughly be translated as "wha' wha'?"

Neolog.bg is a jargon dictionary written by the website users and is as colourful as colloquial Bulgarian gets.

Entries are classified into 12 groups of related words, often related to their origin or the context in which they are used, like narcotics, her, him, dialect, foreign, alcohol, technology, retro, office, cars, forms of address and a catch-all category of others.

Each entry is accompanied by example sentences and etymological information. Though that latter bit of information is frequently not much more than a town or neighbourhood where the word or expression is said to have been first used.

While I'm writing this, the latest entries include митоман (mitoman), for someone who believes in myths; на Мелмак съм (I'm on Melmak), meaning I'm so drunk that I don't know where I am, after the planet from which the television character Alf came; плювалник (plyuvalnik, something or someone who spits) for an inkjet printer; черпя дроба (cherpya droba), meaning that I'm treating my liver because I'm having a drink; or 404 for someone who's not there, after the error message for a missing webpage.
Besides linguistic playfulness, the neologisms frequently turn into a psychological sketch of their authors. One user posted чочка (chochka, for male private parts), immediately followed by the verb чочкам (chochkam, but meaning something with which one is preoccupied for a long time).

Some words have more unexpected origins, like бомбастика (bombastika, from the English bombastic), which was said to have been introduced by Simeon Saxe-Coburg in a statement to journalists.

Whatever the biases and interests of those posting new words, the site is an interesting testimony of some of the most lively edges of the language. And while most words are not likely to get you very far in every-day situations, being able to understand how language and meaning are modulated in new words that enter a language simply makes it so much more fun to know and speak a language. Any language.

Much of what makes these types of sites entertaining can only be really understood when you have a grasp of the language and the ways in which words are formed or transformed. Not quite for beginners in the language, but as a good test of how you're doing.