Words Don’t Come Easy
There are around three quarter of a million words in the English language and approximately 1,000 new word entries to the Oxford dictionary annually, and yet somehow English still doesn’t always serve my linguistic purposes. Other languages have wonderful words that my native tongue simply has no equivalence for. Some lexical nuances are anthropological responses to context and conditions. For example, the fact that Inuit have over 50 words for snow; the variance in snow attributes are important to acknowledge, if it is to be utilised for differing purposes. However, other languages just seem to have summed up the human condition more eloquently than we do in English. The Germans are bloody crackerjack at this, they are a virtual smorgasboard (thank you Sweden) of lingual delights. Most of us are familiar with schadenfreude, the delight in the discomfort of others. Although this is arguably the apex of linguistic achievement, there are other jewels in the German vernacular crown. Have you ever met someone that you want to smack right in the gob? Well, you no longer have to struggle for a way describe your urge, Deuthcland has done it for you; Backpfeifengesicht, literally means a “face in need of a fist”. Or another Teutonic top runner for best word in the world, treppenwitz, which means to think of a comeback, long after it is too late to use. I live my life in a constant state of treppenwitz. So now, thanks to Germany, I can finally express it when I call someone 5 weeks after a conversation and yell “remember when I asked for your opinion? Yeah, me neither” before hanging up, re-sult! However, despite extending myself outside of my heritage language, I still feel there is a deficiency in my parlance that I intend to begin remedying by inventing some vocabulary of my own. Here is a sample
Floovering (flu/vur/eng)Verb -The act of creating a ball of fluff that won’t suck up and feeding it into the mouth of the vacuum cleaner by hand.
Cancation (can/kay/shun) Noun – The overwhelming sense of relief, bordering on holiday joy, that is experienced when plans are canceled on a Saturday night and you can put your pajamas back on.
Weblash (web/lash) Verb – The act of looking away aggressively enough to cause neck injury when someone is entering their PIN number, so as to make it crystal clear you are not trying to commit cyber-crime.
Ballater (ball/at/ur) Noun – A person who makes far too much eye contact when engaging with you.
Desalutation (de/sell/u/tay/shun) Verb – The act of pretending to be deeply engrossed in an activity, so as to avoid greeting someone in public.
Percosate (perk/o/saet) Noun – A person so relentlessly perky that you want to slip prescription pain meds into their herbal tea.
Humanknotification (hu/man/not/if/ik/a/shun) Noun – The paralysing sensation of displacement, when you find yourself part of team building exercises.
Greenearing (gree/neer/eng) Verb – The act of headbutting someone when going in for a greeting that involves a kiss. See also Silipping (see/lip/ping) Verb – The act of kissing fewer or more times than the other party involved in a greeting involving a kiss; usually concluding in an awkward air kiss of God help us, lip to lip contact.
Falsofacation (fal/sofa/ka/shun) Noun – A lie told when responding to the text question, “what are you up to?” Specifically when you are on the sofa up to your elbows in Cheezels and season 8 of Real Housewives and do not want to be asked to do something that will interrupt your current activity.
Regretimule (re/gret/ee/mule) Noun – The terror that gnaws in the bottom of your stomach when you are at the airport and asked to declare whether you packed your own suitcase and you have talked yourself into thinking that maybe you have accidentally sewn 20kgs of uncut heroin into the lining of your luggage.
Coiffusion (cwaff/use/shun) Noun -The feeling of self-hatred when the hairdresser gives you a “trim” that looks like you’ve gone on a bad date with Edward Scissorhands and you say, “thank you, it looks great” while internalising the fact you will have to wear a beanie for the foreseeable future.
Please feel free to use these terms with gay abandon. The more others embrace the patois, the less I sound like a raving lunatic with no grasp on any known language and the more I sound like the architect of new lingua franca. A language through which we can express our innermost oddness succinctly and be understood by our peers. Move over Dr.Johnson, there’s a new wordsmith in the house. I’m not actually deluded enough to really think all my efforts will catch on – although yesterday, I did tell my husband I had just finished floovering (he looked at me and asked if I had been drinking at breakfast again). If all else fails and my venacular venturing does not take off, I could always draw inspiration from a much more astute and wittier columnist than I, Robert Benchley who said “Drawing on my fine command of the English language, I said nothing.”
