It took me until a day after reading this to realize that the word-building here is actually fairly decent.
Perhaps not jaw-droppingly so in its own right, but... It's just, while reading it everything in the moment is through the chaotic lens of the protagonist making an absolute clown of himself, and/or fantasy-BL shenanigans; yet I woke up the next morning realizing I have a pretty decent idea how their society works, and that it's decently compelling as these things go. A bunch of things that felt like convenient excuses from the setting as we went along merged (in retrospect and once the reader knows more) into a so-far fairly-cohesive description of their little mer-person world, and I think that's decently neat.