By PAT WICK

Contributing writer

As times change, words change. In olden days, we had parlors or day rooms. Since the 1950s we’ve had dens, though I suppose now they’d be offices or family rooms.

“Bling” is such a new word my computer does not have it in its database. You may not either. It was coined by the younger set, as new words often are, to describe bright, flashy, showy, gaudy, and sometimes cheap jewelry. This was called costume jewelry when I was a kid.

Bling glitters. You notice bling. Being noticed is what bling is all about.

Another word is “kistchy,” but that has a slightly different meaning, leaning past cheap toward tacky and tasteless.

What is taste? Taste changes with the environment and the year. In my grandmother’s era it was tasteless to hang your underwear on the clothesline outside. While I was growing up, it was tasteless to let a bra strap show. Nowadays, clotheslines are almost a thing of the past, we’ve been through the era where bras were burned and now people wear underwear instead of clothes or put underwear on the outside of regular clothes.

So what do you call that?

As social customs have changed through the years, we struggle to keep up with acceptable terms for the man in your life that you live with but are not married to. “Shacking up” was a derogatory term for many years. As unmarried couples became more abundant, the term “live-in” sprang up, and eventually we coined a term with more respect: “significant other.”

The other day I heard someone refer to the man in their life as “my spouse equivalent.” Spouse equivalent (which my computer has in its thesaurus) sounds respectful and honoring, but it’s a long explanation. Maybe we need some kids to come up with a new word that describes long-term, loving, and committed relationships that aren’t defined in legal terms.

Same-sex relationships are equally challenged. A husband is a man, and a wife is a woman in common usage of language. I listened to a talk-show host explaining her solution.

“She’s my wife,” she said. “I’m her wife, too.”

I thought to myself, “That works.”

My aunt used to say, “Everybody needs a wife. Who wouldn’t want one?”

The wife is most often the person who cooks, cleans, makes sure you have clean clothes, keeps the house looking good, brings in bouquets of flowers, picks the beans, and makes cinnamon rolls. “Wife” is a word with nice connotations. “Wife” is a woman, first of all, and then maybe a married one, according to the dictionary. She is also a mature woman, a companion, a consort, or a spouse.

Our friend Tony used to coin words. He was of the generation for which words were important tools of exploration. Proper words and a lot of them were a sign that you were an educated, well-informed, erudite, skilled, and cultured individual.

Tony hunted for a word to describe our relationship to him, especially my sister’s involvement in his life, because she was his primary caretaker (and he didn’t particularly like that word because it suggested he wasn’t entirely independent). We were, in fact, shirt-tail relatives because his sister married our mother’s cousin, but that was too long and too sketchy of an explanation.

So Tony came up with the word “syebling.” Jess wasn’t his child, his offspring, or his issue. She wasn’t a member of his immediate family, as “sibling” would express, so she became his syebling, his new word for a significant person in the scheme of things. It was a way of introducing someone and provoking a conversation.

It’s another day in the country, and I’m sure that somewhere someone is coining a new word. Meanwhile I’m brushing up on the meaning of some old ones.