30 Essential New Words

. . . Terms from the used-book business, terms for stupid customers and bad drivers and other everyday annoyances. Those coined by me are marked bdg.


1. book climbing. scouting for books in a location where the amount of refuse, junk, rubble, discarded personal effects, furniture, etc, must be climbed over to get to the books. Book climbing is always risky but especially so in a place where the people in charge don't want to let you climb. bdg (Other bookdealers call this book crawling, digging, or excavation.)

2. cactet. a really bad band. (cacaphony + quartet.) bdg

3. citiot. urban idiot; a person of city origin who comes to the country on vacation and treats the place like his own personal garbage dump. (coined by Crosshair, a fellow online wordgame player, who said the term is about 25 years old.)

4. combateer. bad driver of any ridiculously large vehicle (SUV, pickup, van); such vehicles not only impart a false sense of security to the driver but they impede the visibility of all other drivers. Term based on the fact that Hummers, which are perhaps the most ridiculously large vehicle of all, were designed for use in combat zones. bdg (Click here to see more New Terms for Bad Drivers )

5. crebbit. opposite of debit. bdg

6. cussism. my uncle Fred's religion. bgd

7. custoner. stupid customer. (customer + stoner) bdg 2009

8. derogen. derogatory racial or ethnic term, such as abo, cracker, wetback. There seem to be a million of these terms yet no one has invented a simple word for them. (pronounced der-OGG-en) bdg 1982

9. dickularian. genteel-sounding epithet (or adjective) for a creep. bdg

10. elbow driver. a species of foffer (see below) who drives with one hand at the top of the wheel and the other hand doing something useless. So called because they often end up trying to steer with their elbow, and because they often have their other elbow hanging out the window where it can do no good. bdg 2008

11. emulationism. trade name or folk term for something that sounds precious but is only a cheap imitation, such as German silver (an alloy like pewter) or Alaska sable (skunk fur). bdg 2008. Click here to read my collection of emulationisms.

12. epeople. people who used the internet a lot.

13. fale (n. and adj.). both male and female.

14. flumlum. 1. nonsense. 2. doodad; thingamabob.

15. foff. 1. to do things while driving that you shouldn't do while driving. 2. to drive without proper hand placement on the steering wheel. bdg

16. foffer. 1. one who drives while trying to do something they shouldn't be doing while they drive, such as: using a cell phone; peeling an orange; putting on mascara. 2. one who drives without good hand placement on the steering wheel, such as: only one hand, at the bottom; only one hand, at the top; both hands at the top. bdg

17. foffle. to lose control of the vehicle because you were foffing. bdg

18. hexpo. witch convention.

19. igluet. 1. a small pile of snow. 2. a small statue made of snow. 3. a small igloo. bdg

20. jellot. a zealot who is really wishy washy. bdg 2007

21. moudness. mysterious quality a person has that scares other people away. bdg Jul 2008

22. munro. name invented and placed on a list or in a reference in order to use as test when trying to track down a copyright violator. bdg

23. plorf. the uncanny ability to see perfectly good words that aren't real words in word games. bdg

24. proctomorph. polite-seeming epithet for an asshole. bdg 1970s

25. roft. the last part of a cold / flu / the crud. One who is suffering in the last part of such a condition is rofting; they are a rofter. bdg 2008

26. sgwipe. carcass of a dead animal run over in the road. bdg 1978 (Note: I coined this word years before I ever heard the now common term "road kill," and besides, English needs a word that begins sgw--.)

27. thip. to set something in motion by curling a finger behind your thumb and then releasing the finger with great speed. (We had this word in my family since I was a small child; I don't know where it came from.)

28. thresto. general term for any object that tends to snag on everything. For example, a long coat can be a thresto ("that book must have been knocked over by a thresto") or eczema can cause threstos ("my finger has a thresto on it again"). The adjective is threstic. bdg 2008

29. ueai. the sinking feeling you get when playing a word game and there are way too many vowels to deal with. (pronounced OO-ee-aye) bdg July 2008

30. ultracrepidarian. a literate moron; one who has books on display in their house, just for looks, and never reads. (coined by Babble Rabble, a fellow online wordgame player, Jan 2009.)

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