“Mayhaps”- I’ve been saying it for so long I don’t recall where I picked it up. I thought maybe from a Shakespeare play. Apparently it’s slang. Wayward. I feel durty now. I thought it was perfectly cromulent.
Well, it’s just “mayhap”. It’s an adverb. And it may be archaic, but it is perfectly cromulent. 
Slang words are still words. And today’s slang is tomorrow’s standard usage.
Oh my god I have one of these.
‘Agida or Agita’
A couple of months or so after I moved in with my husband I said this to one of my kids while they were doing something to annoy me at the dinner table. “You’re giving me agida.” I’d said it 100 times before, I’d heard my mother say it thousands of times.
My husband looked at me like I had 3 heads and said ‘What? What did you say?? That’s not a word!’
Well, I was convinced it was, but I couldn’t find it in any medical lit, and figured since he works in the medical field, I’d just have to take his word for it. And I just about stopped using it.
THEN, we heard one of the characters on The Sopranos use it one night, and boy, did I feel vindicated. Now my husband uses it more than I do. I guess I just have that affect on him. 
Well, I have done a search on the complete text of Shakespeare’s works, and despite my *absolute confidence * that I would find that word *mayhap * there, I did not. However, it does appear in Dickens, Melville, Conrad, etc. as listed here, and it’s a perfectly cromulent, if archaic word meaning perchance, or maybe, or “as it may happen.”
If it follows the rules of English morphology and syntax, and the people around you understand what it means, of course it’s a word. Here’s a helpful rant.
While it certainly is a word, it’s not one I’d ever heard before. Looks like it came directly from southern Italy in 1982, which means that having seen it on the Sopranos doesn’t “vindicate” you in that it’ll still be your fault if you use that word around people who may not know what it means. ETA: It’s probably even confusing in most of Italy, as it comes from an unusual pronunciation from a presumably oddball dialect.
I hope your husband’s learned something about spewing bullshit about what is or isn’t a word based on the assumption that he’s God of the English Language, though.
so the s came along naturally? I’m in the clear?
What about ginormous? My sister tried to correct me yesterday. I was having none of it. I said “a word means precisely what I mean it to mean” or some such jazz.
You mean “effect”.
jesus christ.
I don’t think I could have butchered that post any more than I did.
Aww crud. You all are giving me effin’ agida by pointing out my retarded grammar usage.
The problem with going down a list of words and asking, “Is this a word? Is this a word?” is that there is no definition of “word” that is at the same time (a) objective, (b) agreed-upon, and © specific enough to be relevant to the issue at hand. “Is this a word?” is a fundamentally ridiculous question, which can’t be reliably answered any more than “Do colorless green ideas sleep furiously?” can. As noted in the rant I linked to above, the majority of pedantry concerning which things are and aren’t “[correct] words” is based on absurd premises with no support whatsoever.
Noam Chomsky posited that a native speaker’s intuition is by far the most meaningful apparatus for determining what is and isn’t “right” in a given language. That’s not universally accepted in the field of linguistics, but those linguists who aren’t crocks (read: aren’t prescriptivists) will tell you that it’s fairly serviceable when you’re trying to figure out whether or not it’s proper to use a given word in a given situation. Your intuition, I imagine, is that you can say “ginormous” in any context in which you find it appropriate and every native English speaker in the room will instantly understand what you mean. What the hell is wrong with that?
(FTR, ginormous comes from American WWII slang.)
Not to pile on further, but it happens to be “agita”. ETA: and it comes from the Italian word for heartburn, AIUI.
Yep, that’s Gaudere’s Law in action – any time you nitpick somebody’s spelling or grammar, your reply will inevitably contain a spelling or grammar errir. 
While growing up I would use the word “defraught” in place of “distraught” all the time; I was quite embarrassed when an English teacher finally pointed out that word didn’t exist.
(And don’t get me started on the meaning of “enormity”…)
Well first things first, colourless green ideas do sleep furiously. They’ve kept me up tonight.
Otherwise I agree with you. However, we all have our parameters. There are certain slang terms I use that I like but I also absolutely HATE others. Pick and mix, ymmv, imho.
agita agita agita.
I never had to type it out before. The t is most definitely pronounced as a d.
:dies:
Don’t beat yourself up about it. That pronunciation of “t” (voiced–that is, your vocal cords are vibrating while you’re saying it, whereas they wouldn’t be in “Tim” or “esteemed”) in certain circumstances is characteristic of the American accent. IIRC–and take this with a grain of salt, since I have actually taken only one linguistics class (damn my deficient community college!)–it’s a process called “assimilation”, wherein voiceless /t/ turns into voiced [d] when it’s next to a voiced vowel. We often don’t realize how many sounds any one particular consonant can have. For example, the sound represented by “tt” in butter or the “dd” in budding in American English is the exact same sound as the single “rolled r” (alveolar flap) in Spanish americano. ETA: That last thing is not an example of assimilation. Yikes, I better just go to bed.
I always feel that “clapter” should be a word. I mean, if we have laughter…you know?
I’m willing to compromise: claption.
Then musicians can go around saying that Claption is God. 
I’ve been thinking of starting a movement to make “logistify” a word. You know, like, “You can logistify it all you want, but it’s still not a word.” There has to be some word that means “to make logical”. Any takers?
It sounds like the word you want is rationalize. You don’t want a word that means “to make logical”, you want a word that means “to make logicky”. (Compare “truthfulness” to “truthiness”.) Which is a fantastic neologism in and of itself, I might add.
My spell checker told me the word liberative didn’t exist, but I checked and it does.