Does this experience sound familiar?

You're chattering away about something--regaling your friends with a captivating story, perhaps, or plumbing the depths of the human condition with a like-minded sage--and you can't think of a word to express something.  If you were writing alone in your garret, you could take some time to fill this lexical gap, but your audience is hanging on your every word--and now you don't have the right one!  You can't very well stop the conversation so that you cook up an acronym or toss a few words in the blender and see what comes out.

What did you do?

Well, I wasn't there. (I mean, I would remember that fabulously regaling story or that mind-expanding discourse, right?)  Still, I'll bet I can tell you what you did.  You reached into your vast storehouse of affixes, tacked one onto a familiar word, and created a new word that fit fairly neatly into your sentence.  Then you probably said something like "Is that even a word?"  People laughed, and you went on with your story or your conversation.

How do I know what happened?  I have heard this kind of thing happen over and over again, and there's a good reason.

You remember affixation from last week's column, right?  (By the way, AI clearly doesn't remember.  When I tried to type that word in the last sentence, it tried to tell me I meant "a fixation."  Unlike me, AI apparently does not have a fixation on affixation.)