Kurt R.A. Giambastiani

Words are important in my house. We like to be precise in our words, but sometimes there just isn’t a word for what we want to say. If we were really industrious, we could scour the interwebs for a foreign word that sums up what we want–like Schadenfreude or tartle–but it’s so much easier (and tons more fun) simply to make up a word of our own. Do others do this, or are we just…insane certifiable weird? Growing up, my family had respect for vocabulary, but never actually created new words, but my wife’s dad was a champion word-coiner and word-repurposer, making a language subset they called Schoenfeldese. Obviously, she is the vector for this infection. But, are we alone? I compiled a list of our freshly minted neologisms to share with you, and I invite you to share yours as well. Repurposed words/phrases:

• brown
  1. noun – ground beef and onions in brown gravy, served over pasta or rice
• gob’s first slurp
  1. noun – in the horror/dead-teenager/slasher movie genre, the first victim of the antagonist, usually caught out alone, away from the others
• green trees
  1. noun – broccoli, usu. when used as an addition to other dishes (e.g. brown)
• warm-cold
  1. adjective – pertaining to the weather, a day where the temperature feels both warm and cold at the same time, usu. clear/partly cloudy but cold (cf. clubby)

True neologisms:

• blort
  1. verb – to sputter in laughter while drinking a beverage; in movie parlance, a “spit take”
• chunder
  1. verb – to mutter in a grumpy manner
• clubby
  1. adjective – pertaining to the weather, overcast, cloudy (cf. warm-cold)
• feep
  1. noun – a person exceptionally subservient to superiors and exceptionally overbearing to those in lower positions of power; a toady/martinet
• flummadiddle
  1. verb – to flop and flail about in a frantic, noisy manner; particular to cats in the early hours when their food bowl is empty.
• gaw-ti-gaw
  1. noun – a knicknack or “something-something,” decorative and usu. of sentimental value
• goo
  1. noun – carbonated beverage of any type, with the default value being cola; derivatives include diet goo, root goo, clear goo, and orange goo
• gleep
  1. verb – to appropriate inadvertently, such as a drink or pen, i.e., pens at the checkout counter are attached by chains to reduce gleeping.
• grundgel (pron. GRUND-jel)
  1. verb – to grind up dry material, as coffee beans or stale bread; not applicable to ingredients with a high moisture content
• mobble
  1. verb – to place one’s hand on another creature and move it rapidly but gently side-to-side, usu. done to cat’s heads and other people’s faces.
• punkle
  1. verb – to portion a large piece into smaller pieces, usu. for storage, usu. rel. to foodstuffs, i.e., “I need to punkle that family-sized pack of ground beef for the freezer.”
  2. noun – an item that has already been portioned for storage, e.g., a punkle of ground beef; can also refer to pre-portioned items, esp. small bundles of firewood sold at grocery stores.
• slocker
  1. noun – a swig of something of questionable delectability, usu. said of a dose of cold medicine
• slooby
  1. adjective – tired and sleepy, usu. as a side-effect of cold medications/prescription meds.
• smerb
  1. noun – a dollop of topping applied with a sharp downward jerk of the serving spoon, usu. used in conjunction with smob (e.g., put a smerb on that smob)
• smob
  1. noun – gelatin dessert with mixed fruit
• snain
  1. noun – a mixture of separate snow and rain falling simultaneously, caused by precipitation from two atmospheric levels (cf. splat)
• snurfle
  1. verb – to breath in sharply through the nose, usu. with one’s mouth twisted to one side, for the purpose of controlling mucus production during a rhinovirus event
• splat
  1. verb – when rain begins to turn to snow, and falls in a half-frozen admixture, usu. in reference to the shape such precipitation makes on the windshield of a vehicle, i.e., a “splat” or “asterisk”
• splibble
  1. verb – to accidentally dribble something that leaves a drip-shaped stain on the front of one’s clothing
  2. noun – the stain left by the act of splibbling
• squeepy
  1. adjective – pertaining to the weather, rainy, drizzly (cf. clubby); semi-onomatopoeic construct, taken from the sound of tennis shoes on hardwood/linoleum floors after coming in from such weather
• yark
  1. verb – to vomit, generally in reference to cats, esp. as to hairball regurgitation

This, of course, is not an all-inclusive list, but these are the ones that have been around for years and achieved a certain…stature.