I didn’t invent it, but I did adopt the South Park version of “Victim”—in the context where you might usually refer to something as being “used for a test” or “experimental” or simply “used for parts.”
For example, when attempting to modify a 3D object file to see how the changes will look in a simulator, or trying to convert video files with a method I’m not sure will work? Well, either for ease of identification while I’m using it, or to differentiate something I’m worried might become corrupted from tinkering with it from a master backup copy, the experimental file becomes the “victim” file, and is renamed appropriately.
Shprinky is a word I coined for a cat I knew. He was at once sneaky and slinky, coming into rooms with an effort at surreptitiousness, but the effect was ruined because he was also very springy on his little cat feet. He was shprinky. Well, until the neighbor’s Rottweiler got him. But that’s another story.
Also scoddle, which is the particularly ineffective method that some parents have of scolding a child while also cuddling her. Because she’s distracted by the cuddling, the message of the scolding never sinks in. As an extension of that, scoddling is any message that is meant to be instructive/disciplinary but is ineffective because of how it is delivered. My mother’s boss, who wants to be everyone’s friend, is regularly guilty of scoddling her employees.
Lastly, a friend who was a father at 20 became a grandfather at 40. Because he’s a very young 40, still very cool, active, a competitive bicyclist and rock musician, I christened him, and his grandson now calls him, grandude.
I don’t know if this counts, as it’s just a variation on “Watergate,” but it was picked up by the BBC. Really.
We had a scandal here in Thailand a year or two ago. The prime minister who got booted out in the 2006 military coup had his lawyer deliver some pastry boxes to some judges or prosecutors at lunchtime. Some unusually honest officials they were too, because those boxes were stuffed with money, and the officials indignantly refused the bribe!
I mentioned to a close local reporter friend that he ought to call it Pastrygate, and he did. Next thing I know, the BBC’s Jonathan Head, who was the Bangkok correspondent but is based in Turkey now, was using it in his reports.
Yoink - to take or steal - from the cartoon sound when someone grabs an item. “Who yoinked the last beer?” or “are you going to eat that - yoink - mine now.”
(Now I see that the word is actually used in this thread by SleepDuck! You yoinked my word!)
Octopurse - a purse with huge straps that my wife keeps getting tangled up in her feet as she gets in and out of the car.
It wasn’t actually my doing, but in a game I started in the Game Room some time back, kunilou finally came up with the name Malapropagation for what we were doing. That was to string together malapropisms so one would cause another and the ball kept getting kicked across the court.
I have had my share of coined words, but they’ve been family confined or else the sort of thing most Dopers do as a matter of course,
Thing like Suck It Silly for Circuit City, which apparently sucked an adequate amount.
This makes me think of one that was my invention or at least I shared in it between my brother and several friends. For a time in the 50’s there was a type of pants (usually black chinos) that had a buckle in the back, between the pockets, that was there purely for the decoration and served no purpose that I ever knew about.
We called them Flag Britches and since nothing but geeks and nerds and wimps and worthless scum wore them we called any of those guys Flaggy Dudes. Eventually, we shortened the Flaggy Dude thing to just Flag. Flag was not a nickname you wanted!
I’ve been saying “prolly” since the early '80s. I see and hear it everywhere now.
My buddy Blue Elk and I coined the term stuart when we first started snowboarding. You can see the origin of the term here at 3:40.
This started because when we were standing in line for the lift one day early in our career, he did a little standing jump a couple of times and was all like “haha I didn’t fall down! Check me out!” and I was all like “Big Deal; you can stuart” to which he replied (of course) “Look what I can do! Look what I can do!”
smug speed = the speed at which people drive luxury cars, which is too fast to get around them but still slow enough to be annoying
jackassaholery = foolish, messing around behavior (‘tomfoolery’) as performed by a jackass/asshole; indicates behavior more annoying than standard tomfoolery
meanderthal – a person who, instead of striding purposefully forward, meanders idly along and hogs the sidewalk/path
Most of my coinages have to do with things that annoy me. No surprise, I guess.
Sarahndipity (ous): When someone, after protesting loudly and publicly about intrusion into her life by the media, suddenly does an about face when money is involved.
