That's Mister Potato to you

I liked this quirky collection of random, obscure internet terms, which they could have been making up.

I was particularly struck by the term POTATO - Person Over Thirty Acting Twenty One (or Twenty-one Online). A cruel smack in the face to those of us who've grown old but haven't grown up.

Still, if you're over 30 and you regularly use 'lolz' you deserve to be called much worse than a potato.

On the subject of potatoes, I'd seen this postcard before Elaine blogged it but have no way of proving that now - the secret of true happiness!

Word of the week: obesogenic

I saw this in a blog post about public health that was talking about McDonalds and other companies posing as responsible corporations while still selling tons of their "obesogenic and dentally challenging" products.

I'm not sure who coined the word, but whoever it was deserves a 'Well done!'

10 weird words that are fun to say

Sasquatch

Boing

Shibboleth

Squelch

Chugalug

Piffle

Fandango

Zephyr

Haddock

Flange

Word of the weekend

My lovely wife can purse her lips and make a bizarre whistling noise like a balloon losing air. It occasionally annoys me, when she does this for long lengths of time.

Now thanks to my obsolete-word-a-day calendar, I have a word to describe it: SQUACKETT, defined as any disagreeable noise made with the mouth.

"Stop that squackett, you're making a racket!"

Word of the week: Spanwhengle

A semi-learned friend gave me a 'lost language' day to day calendar and Wednesday's this week was rather apt.

Spanwhengle (obsolete): to violently shake or knock around.

As in: I had a wisdom tooth out on Wednesday and I feel spanwhengled.

Word of the week: Twazmuppet

I saw this word in a comment on a blog and it made me laugh so much. It's one of those words. You hear it, and you don't need an explanation. You know what it means. In fact, you're probably thinking of someone who is a twazmuppet right now.

I've been experiencing some schadenfreude of late. I know I'm a bad person, but I love to say 'I told you so'. There's a little part of me that likes to be proved right by subsequent events. Especially when people were behaving like twazmuppets and now their behaviour is catching up with them.

I think another reason I like this word is because it catches that moment when you're about to call someone a 'twat', then catch yourself because that's not a very Christian word to use (apparently), and you have to supplant the final T with another word entirely.

Like this: "Oh, he's such a twaaa-zzmuppet."

Word of the day: omphaloskepsis

'Contemplation of one's navel.' (Orig from the Greek, word nerds.)

"Hey boss, I need thinking space otherwiase I won't be able to do any omphaloskepsis... and my work will suffer. I'm off to the pub."

The new word for fat

We had a conversation today at coffee time about how malted milk biscuits are sneakily bad for you because they’re full of hydrogenated fats. I commented how I have hydrogenous zones (complete with “seductive” stroking motion).

We all laughed. In fact, I laughed so much that my hydrogenous zones shook.

You’re an Audi…

…constrained to drive at Mini-speeds, my manager said to me today. The prompt for this automotive comparison was the word on his word-a-day calendar:

Hebetude - meaning lethargy or dullness.

What caught his notice was the sentence it was used in: “The hebetude displayed by such bright students was just one sign that they were not being sufficiently challenged in their classes.” Hence the ‘you’re an Audi’ comment, because he sensed I’m not being challenged in my job (probably true), and as a result am lethargic (also probably true).

Staying sharp is a challenge as a copywriter. Occasional chances to stretch creatively help. But it was a word on the back which caught my eye - “hebetate”: “to make dull”. That is one of the primary functions of the committee sign off, as far as I see it - to commit vanillacide and blandify what we do so it’s so inoffensive it’s ineffective.

From now on I’m going to send copy for approval marked up ‘For you to hebetate’. No one will ever look up the definition.

Insincerely...

We get too many cards round work these days and I've been tempted to start signing them with gibberish. I mentioned this to my sister-in-law when we were talking about signing her bright red leg-cast (achilles tendon snap, if you hadn't heard). She says it's stupid, but I think she thought it was a cleverer idea than she'd ever admit. (She doesn't like to humour me as she knows nothing good comes of it...)

Here are a few possible gibberish phrases. Feel free to use them.

Ar Fflarffan Boingo (pretend it's Welsh)
Grond Toglwogl (ersatz Norwegian - or possibly Greenlandic)
Hin Qin Tai Che Roh (could be from any Asian country)
Lapsis Anagooksis (faux Greek - you could additionally claim it's a Cypriot dialect)

NB - to get away with using nonsense greetings is just be confident if anyone asks you what it is. "Well it' s the customary greeting of the Lammu tribe in Vietnam. I just thought it would be fun."

After all, who's gonna know?

"Ooh, go on then, just a gnurt"

I saw this letter in the Times yesterday and it made me smile:

Hard cheese
Sir, My father, being of Orcadian stock, would use the word “gnurt” (silent G) to describe a small piece of food . To be precise, a gnurt was the exact quantity of cheese required to cover a buttered oatcake.
MAGNUS K. MOODIE
Edinburgh

Definitely a word to drop into conversation...

Nutshell

A pithy phrase Matt coined today:

"We're cow-tipping sacred cows..."

Chilly

Did you know that Australian Aborigines used to use dingos as living blankets? Apparently when it was a bit parky they'd call it a "three dog night". One to remember when winter swings around.

(I could also imagine the phrase being used as a description of one of those nights clubbing when you get groped by drunken harpies. If it hasn't happened to you, then you've obviously never been to Flares.)