Jun. 24: Words, words and more words

‘Member Sniglets? They were, like, THE thing for a little while back in the 80’s, thanks to Rich Hall and HBO’s Not Necessarily The News. Sniglets are words that belong in the dictionary but aren’t—words like todlitter (food debris residing under a high chair following an attempted feeding) and meganegabar (the line one draws after writing the amount on a check, to prevent the recipient from adding “and a million dollars”) and ignoranus (a person who’s both stupid and an asshole).

Sniglets were/are awesome. There’s probably a better word to describe them than “awesome,” but I don’t have a single one of the ten Sniglet books that were published way back when, so we’re going with “awesome.” Sorry.

Why do I mention these made-up words? Because in my last post I used the word-that’s-not-a-word “funner” and Lovely Lori H called me on it. She’s a total editor-snob, and that makes her way cool until I have to start defending my own word usage. When I told her that “funner” is a perfectly cromulent word, I GOT HER.

(What? You’ve never heard the word “cromulent” either? What is WRONG with you??? I mean, if you don’t watch The Simpsons, how do you know what to think about religion and politics? Gah.)

Some made-up words become such a part of our popular culture that we forget they’re not even real. I don’t mean words like “orientate” or “irregardless” or “supposably” or “whole ‘nother.” Those are letters that don’t belong together and that only friggin’ morons think are actual words. I’m talking about words like “Jazzercise” and “smackdown” and “hottie” and “unibrow.” These are words that have been added to English language dictionaries in recent years.

Cracked.com published a list of their top 12 most memorable words and phrases first heard on The Simpsons, some of which are now recognized by Webster’s. Kinda scary, huh? (Some of my favorites that didn’t quite make the list: debigulator, disembowelingest, embiggen, sacrilicious, Jeebus, shutterbuggery, and yoink. We use several of these on a regular basis in our household, along with fab phrases like “you can’t win friends with salad” and “Marge, honey-fräulein, I'm home.” Now don’t you wish you lived with us? It’s a laugh a minute, I tells ya.)

That list led me to a blog called Wordlustitude and it contains such fabulousness, I just can’t keep it to myself. My fellow word-lovers will enjoy it too, I’m sure.

Mark Peters (better known as wordlust on Twitter) is a language columnist for Good, a euphemism-collector for Visual Thesaurus, a blogger for Oxford University Press, and a Contributing Editor for Verbatim: The Language Quarterly. He has written about language for The Boston Globe, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Esquire, The Funny Times, Good, Mental Floss, and Nerve. This blog is a growing dictionary of ephemeral words, also known as nonce or stunt words. All readers are strongly encouraged to use these terms (here's the index) in their blogs, poems, prophecies, and recipes.

If the first page of Mr. Peters’ posts don’t grab you, check out some of the links in his sidebar. I think he’s my new favorite dude! (So sorry, Vic—we were good for a few years, though.)