There was this piece: author steps onto an elevator to hear a pitch for solar panel; apparently, a robo dialed up the elevator’s emergency phone, which was an intercom in the wall, an was exhorting him to press one for more information. For six floors. Trapped.
I found this story to be at once both hilarious and disturbing. And wondered whether a word existed to convey that feeling. Searching my imagination, all I could come up with was “teronic” (terony). Which also touches upon that great dark gulf between here and what our word ought to be like: the “cynichasm”.
What words have come into your vocabulary, either through your creativity or through adoption? For a few years, I have been using a word I heard on a radio show, “sprew”, which describes a parking space you do not have to back out of, either because there was no car in the space in front when you got there or the car that was there left before you returned. It just feels so right for the language.
Never pull through a parking space. It just isn’t done. I can’t tell you how many times I have driven up to an empty space only to have the driver from the next lane pull through and park. The last time it happened to me I stopped (with my turn signals still on) and stared at the driver and he densely glared back, the slack-jawed idiot. By the time I got to the next lane the space behind him was taken. If it hadn’t been so close to the store’s camera I thought about blowing out a side window with a tire iron. If I had tire iron with me.
Even if you are pulling through to leave, drivers in the next lane are not expecting a car to suddenly appear.
Somebody, somewhere, sometime, invented “humongous”. My roommate in 1974 used this word regularly. I thought he invented it. When I began to hear or read that word more widely used, and mentioned that to him, he said he thought that he had invented it.
More recently: Affluenza. I wonder who, exactly, came up with that. The prosecutor (meaning it sarcastically)? Some defense psychiatrist? A skeptical op-ed journalist?
Trollarious: Something you find funny simply to piss someone else off.
Channulating: Recreating the experience of watching TV using digital video streams found on the Internet, which feed you endless amounts of different things without requiring human interaction. Best done with grindhouse-style loops of obscure, public-domain sleaze films, trailers for said films, and really low-budget cartoons from the 1960s through the 1980s.
Fauxsic: The diegetic music featured in movies which don’t go to the expense of getting actual musicians to provide music, resulting in a really terrible example of whatever genre’s popular at the time being presented in the film as a big hit.
Softdustrialism: The odd tendency of some software/web companies to use stylized, cleaned-up industrial motifs in their branding. Culminates in a completely software-oriented business occupying a literal brick-and-mortar building with exposed girders and a warehouse-style open floorplan near a microbrewery and a brewpub with similar designs. The people who work there may or may not be excited about the programming language Rust, but almost certainly play games from Valve released on Steam.
Counting Coupland: Using neologistic definitions to point out trends in society, as a way to touch on trends and issues without having to write an essay on the subject. Often involves semi-obscure references aimed at the group you think will agree with you and be impressed by your wordplay.
Internet Containerization: Making a conscious effort to present multiple distinct, disconnected faces to various groups on the Internet, primarily as a way to prevent different groups from knowing opinions which may offend them. Acknowledging the practice is much rarer than practicing it.
That’s “larruping” a word of Dutch origin that means to beat or thrash, dating back to about 1820, and a common American (chiefly southern) until the 1940s. One of Lou Gehrig’s nicknames was “Larrupin’ Lou”.
There was some discussion in one of my HS English classes about that word. We thought we might try to establish a word, so we came up with “flirp”, which describes two people on a collision course, attempting to avoid each other but repeatly moving the same way. Never caught on, as far as I could tell.
I used to have a book full of these by Rich Hall called Sniglets. My absolute favourites included “Essoasso” which is someone who cuts through a gas station to avoid a red light and “Diagonerd” as one who can’t park between the lines.