That quote has so thoroughly saturated internet culture that most of us non-fans wouldn’t even blink at the term.
This usage pops up in groups of software geeks sometimes, too. Of course, being geeks, we’re known to reverse the polarity on it as well. One guy I knew liked to use “Foodage?” to mean “Want to go find something to eat?” I think he liked the parallel to “forage”, since engineers never know where they’re going for lunch.
That’s probably where hackers got it, maybe via teletype nomenclature.
When I was in college, I noticed that nearly all of the students there used the word “Infinite” to mean something big, long, or innumerous but not necessarily infinite, and I picked up the habit. “The trip was infinite”. Trust me – this was Caltech, so they knew the actual meaning. They simply liked saying it.
Even the professors used it for some things – we had “Infinite time exams”, meaning that there was no time limit. But obviously, the exams had to be turned in by a certain day and time. And God help you if you got one of those exams, because they had a reputation of driving students into obsessoin to the point that people would show up to a meal wearing signs that said, effectively: “Don’t bother me – I’m taking an exam right now”.
Today just happens to be the oneth (pronounced wunth) of June. Tomorrow will of course be the twoth (pronounce tooth).
I like to use the construction “much of a…” (from Alice in Wonderland’s “much of a muchness”) when discussing the weather:
heat = much of a hotness
cold = much of a coldness
rain = much of a wetness
Elephants are heffalumps, from Winnie the Pooh.
Breakfast is breakfee (pronounced brekfee).
The dustpan is the sweepee (my father derived that from broom = sweeper, dustpan = sweepee).
For no reason I can think of, oatmeal = goatmeal (I sometimes even say to myself, “Goatmeal, made from real goats!”)
Probably a genuine error, but the other day in the train station, I overheard a woman explaining that she had a “congenial heart defect” and had a scar to show for it. Several people around her started discreetly cracking up.
For almost 3 decades now, I’ve been using my “word,” … “** lunacidal**” to describe a homicidal lunatic, or someone who wants to kills lunatics, either way, really. As in - “Please don’t mess with me today, I am feeling downright lunacidal!!”
When my cat complains at me in a plaintive yowl, I tell her to stop being “complaintive.” I’ve used it a couple of times on children, too. :o
Now, that’s funny!! My dad always said, “Hangaburger,” and “Frijatator.” I thought I learned it from him, but now I understand we might have taught it to him!!
Re: Fox paws
I read words phonetically. For years I thought that was the way it was pronounced.
“Wehawken” Star shaped crack in the windshield.
“Dinglepull” Ornate door handle on cabinet.
“Gerundell” Ornate Victorian style candle with long thin crystals hanging from it. I still don’t know what they’re really called.
Before going shopping, I check to see if I have enough buckage.
“Horse-pistol” for hospital is pretty common.
I occasionally use science fiction profanity. “Frack” and “felgercarb” from Battlestar Galactica, “frell” from Farscape, “tanj” from Larry Niven’s books.
My wife and I got into the habit of making words of nouns suffixed with -age. You know, analogous to linkage, outage, frontage. So we would ask each other questions like “Hoe much ice-creamage do we need to supply?” Or, “How much beachage should our hotel have?”
Much later, watching a White Sox game on TV, I heard whimsical announcer Tom Paciorek doing the same thing, talking about a ball having too much bounce-age.
Just for fun, are there any words you have made up? Or any words you use that are real words, but you use them intentionally wrong?
For me, I use the real word “flibbertigibbet”. I use it as a substitute for “F***”. Screw up on something, or something goes wrong at work - “FLIBBERTIGIBBET!”[/QUOTE
Do you mean the way an object, place or situation can feel unfamiliar, even though you know that it should be familiar? Like, you’re in a house that you’ve been in before, and that you recognize, but it still feels like you’re there for the first time? Or a person that you know suddenly feels like a stranger?
There’s actually a word for that: jamais vu (literally, never seen) and it’s a real thing. But I like your version :D. I actually had a sort of jarring instance of that recently - there’s a road I travel hundreds of times a year to get to the highway. It was late afternoon, there’d been a storm, the road was uncharacteristically untrafficked, and the cloud formation was very low and dense off to my left - all in all giving me the impression that I was in another place entirely (it looked like there was a mountain range a few miles away). It was pretty bizarre until I got another few blocks and there were more major landmarks just before the highway. Kinda creeped me out, it did…
For us, just a couple I can think of offhand though I know there are more.
Deja Vid: when you turn the TV on, it happens to be showing an episode of a show you’ve watched maybe once in your life - and it’s that same one episode on reruns.
explodiate (from a late co-worker) - something that blows up and makes a big mess, e.g. “I tried to cook a potato in the microwave and it explodiated all over the inside”.
food tax (when one person is eating a snack and you reach over their shoulder and filch a bite of it). Obviously this works better with, say, a bowl of popcorn than with a slice of pizza.
Noranges, napples and mice cream (I think I’ll have a norange, or maybe a napple, heck, I’ll have some mice cream instead). Mice cream is also known as throat medicine here. If my husband and I are working on a grocery list, we’ll even say “Get a dozen noranges”.
