They really aren't cones, they aren't conular...

Yesterday I was driving home from school and realized something that I had overlooked for who knows how many years, namely that construction cones aren't really that conical. It was so surprising to me that I had to say it out loud, but the problem was that I could not remember how to describe the shape that these cones weren't so I said, "They really aren't cones, they aren't conular." Sounds like something stupid to be blogging about, huh. But I realized something when that happened - even though I said the wrong word, I was understood, and that's because I had formed a word that followed the rules of the English language. I have noticed that this theme recurs often in language when one doesn't know exactly what the right word is, but using the rules he knows, he is able to form a word that makes sense to the listener. I have studied four languages other than English so far, of three different origins, and I know that at least in two of them, German and Russian, this is the case, that one can make himself understood without knowing the exact right word to use, but also by conjugating other words he knows using rules of the language that he knows. And so, having forgotten the word used in English to describe a cone-shaped object, or rather in my case to describe how non-cone-shaped an object called such actually was, I used a rule that I remembered, that some adjectives end in '-ular'. It's a good thing I'm not critical of myself, and that I'm good at making myself understood, even if I can't speak!