Disquisition

: The Century Dictionary And Cyclopedia, Volume 2, Part 6, pp 1882, "disquisition"

disquisition (dis-kwi-zish'on), n. [= F. disquisition = Sp. disquisicion = Pg. disquisição = It. disquisizione, < L. disquisitio(n-), an inquiry, investigation, < disquirere, pp. disquisitus, inquire, investigate, < dis-, apart, + qucerere, seek : see query, question, acquire, inquire, etc., and cf. acquisition, inquisition, etc.] 1†. A seeking; search; investigation.

: The Paris Review, William Gibson, The Art of Fiction No. 211

Coming up with a word like neuromancer is something that would earn you a really fine vacation if you worked in an ad agency. It was a kind of booby-trapped portmanteau that contained considerable potential for cognitive dissonance, that pleasurable buzz of feeling slightly unsettled.

I believed that this could be induced at a number of levels in a text—at the microlevel with neologisms and portmanteaus, or using a familiar word in completely unfamiliar ways. There are a number of well-known techniques for doing this—all of the classic surrealist techniques, for instance, especially the game called exquisite corpse, where you pass a folded piece of paper around the room and write a line of poetry or a single word and fold it again and then the next person blindly adds to it. Sometimes it produces total gibberish, but it can be spookily apt. A lot of what I had to learn to do was play a game of exquisite-corpse solitaire.

— William Gibson