Good morning, friends.
I've been thinking a lot about "incipient" this morning. It's one of my favorite words. It means, like, "becoming", but it's an adjective. I try to be incipient. I try to always be becoming who I am or who I will be.
It's easy when you're a teenager or in college or whatever to be incipient. Society generally expects it from you and whether or not it did, you still NEED it. As you get older, I feel like it's easy to fall into a place of thinking you've figured out who you are and you're sort of "done" now. I'd rather continue to grow and change and learn and… become.
Also it makes a greaterrible portmanteau with my name: Bencipient.
@benhamill Huh; to my ear *"I am incipient" sounds ungrammatical?
I'm not quite sure if it has to do with the (lack of) animacy of its referent, or if there's something else my sleepy brain is sensing.
E.g. it feels like one can talk of "incipient joy" but not "incipient cat".
That said: indeed, Western society expects us to have ourselves sorted *long* before we're fully mature. I'm 45 & only just now think I know what I want to be when I grow up! 🙃
@Qwyrdo I think I hear what you're saying on grammaticalness. I think it's definitely a reach. To me it feels like a sort of challenging reach, rather than a breach, if that makes sense. As in, "I challenge you to adjust your understanding of this word slightly to understand it as applying to this context." YMMV, though, of course. 😄
@Qwyrdo Indeed. So I just looked it up and saw the definition as "beginning, commencing". So, "incipient joy" is joy that's new, that's just starting. I'm stretching the meaning more heavily than I realized I think (because I stretched it so long ago I forgot, maybe) by saying it means "becoming". Maybe that's the source of your feeling?
@benhamill Probably.
As my brain cells come online one by one, I think it's not animacy but class of referent?
"Incipient" thus modifies nouns; specifically, nouns of state? So "incipient joy" works because joy is a noun describing a (mental) state. But *"incipient cat" is awkward, because grammatically, cat is a concrete noun; it doesn't describe a state of being.
(Ofc I myself would quibble about that last bit, nyan 
)
@Qwyrdo Yeah. "Incipient cat" might feel even weirder because it sounds like it's talking about the cat physically and, aside from newborns, cats aren't really commencing or beginning or becoming. About a person, though, "incipient Ben," isn't about me physically, it's more about my personality (and/or personhood?) which makes me feel like it's somewhat closer to "joy" in that it's an abstract noun. IDK. 
@benhamill Yeah, it definitely feels edge-casey to me! And Stars know I'm no prescriptivist 😋
Just trying to suss out *what* about "I am incipient" makes my Spidey senses tingle!