I thought of this while posting in the favorite underused words thread, and I figured it would be better to split it off than to try to hijack that one.
I’m a stickler for grammar and punctuation, but I absolutely love making up words. Here are some of the entries in my vast pseudocabulary:
“Oxtabajillion” is my favorite imaginary number. It lies somewhere between a bajillion and a googol.
“Wazbob” is one of several generic names for function arguments that one of my comp sci professors came up with. “Well, what does this function take? It takes a number, a string, and a wazbob.”
“Snargit” and “Hargit” both serve as generic exclamations, but they do have technical definitions as well: In a collection of similar objects, the snargits are the objects that are plentiful but smaller in size, whereas the hargits are the objects that are less common but much larger in size. For example, if you’ve got a dozen chicken eggs and one ostrich egg, you might say “Could you bring me the eggs? Just the snargits, not the hargit.”
“You krimpin?” is slang for “Are you krimping?” which in itself is a ubiquitous made-up phrase that can mean any of the following: “Are you serious?”, “Are you joking?”, “Are you trying to get me to punch you in the face?”, or “Are you really so dumb that you don’t see this obvious fact which I now have to spell out explicitly?”. Clearly a very useful shorthand for such cumbersome phrases.
“Slantagoon” fairly self-explanatory.
“Moosejockey” and “Schmeener” are filler words when you can’t think of the name of a particular noun; similar to “doohickey” and “whatchamacallit”.
“Narm” is a softer variant of “No” that often implies there is a specific reason for the refusal of something that would otherwise be desireable: “Do you want to get pad thai later?” “Narm, I’m playing at an open mic night later.”
“Shibbers McGoo” is an exclamation used when you feel you just don’t understand or can’t cope with the people or situation around you. Similar to “Oh bother” or sighing.
What are yours?
