Vocabulary

I like unusual terms for things. I particularly enjoy made-up terms for things. I thrive on neologisms and newly-minted phrases. A good portmanteau or a recycled and re-purposed cliché can have me chuckling quietly to myself for hours (sad, isn't it?).

Unfortunately, I find that most of these terms tend to be transient and fleeting as they never become mainstream and they are eventually forgotten. With that in mind, I would like to record a few here, for posterity (so to speak).

I suppose my father is the main culprit cause of my interest in this sort of thing. For as long as I can remember he has been happily ignoring general vocabulary conventions and making the language up as he goes along. So much so that I think it would be an interesting project to compile a lexicon of terms that he uses, along with their definitions and usage criteria - but that's for another day.

My father's main source of neologisms is repurposed words, often word pairs combined in new and unexpected ways. As an example, the remote control for the television (which is known to most people as a remote, zapper, etc.) is known as a "bollard jumper" in our family. There is no apparent logic behind this, which is probably what makes it so memorable. Another example of a word used only by our family is arch, which is used to describe something that is in some way excellent or otherwise superlatively positive. It is a very commonly used word, describing anything from a meal to a film to a flight.

There are also "generic" words, like the Hiberno-English (is this getting pretentious yet? I didn't want to say "Irish" because it would be confusing) yoke or the Latin-American vaina. The standard catch-all word used by my father is raspberry, giving rise to exchanges such as:

Dónall: Have you seen the bollard-jumper?
Father: It's under the raspberry.
Dónall: Arch.

In this case, the word raspberry could refer to absolutely anything, and yet the meaning is often, and surprisingly, apparent from the context.

A more easily interpretable word is shed, which is used to describe anything that can contain something else – in practise, cupboards, drawers, wardrobes, attics, cellars, etc.

There is an entire category of words that are melanges of two or more languages, and commonly used in my family. Possibly the most common is to the platform, which means "OK" (via the French au quai). Any conversation between any two members of my family will be liberally sprinkled with unusual terms, mostly taken from combining English and Spanish, although French is usually acceptable too.

The general formula for these terms is to take a sentence in one language and purposefully mistranslate it into another one. This will frequently take the form of literally translated idioms, such as to give oneself of low, meaning to unsubscribe from something. These are usually the funniest types of neologisms, although the potential audience for the joke is restricted to those with a reasonable grasp of all the languages involved…

My friend Tinsley (who apparently doesn't like to be called Tinsley on this blog) has come to appreciate many of these bilingual terms in recent years. He is also frequently a good source of interesting monolingual terms. Probably my favourite one of his is ramipercussions, which is a portmanteau of "ramifications" and "repercussions" and has a wonderfully awkward sound when said out loud. Also, if you believe in the idea of morphological onomatopoeia, I think the surface similarity to the word "rambunctious" gives it a pleasantly whimsical connotation.

A recent gem of Tinsley's is to pronounce things as the crow flies, meaning to pronounce them directly as written, as opposed to whichever roundabout way is required by the language. It was, in fact, this term that inspired me to write this particular post.

My most widely-accepted neologism is weblord. I suspect some people might dispute that I came up with the term as it has reached a certain amount of currency in some of my social circles, but I am quite certain that I came up with it independently of anybody else. The origin, for me at least, is Robert Rankin's use of the term barlord instead of barman. Many years ago, I felt the term webmaster wasn't quite as grandiloquent as it could be, and so modified it to weblord. It gained currency because I insisted that the official title of the webmaster of the DCU ultimate club (and, later, Captain Drinking Binge) be WebLord.

This is quickly becoming a long-winded article, and so I will now cut it short, with a promise to post more on this topic at a future date (as I have only really scratched the surface here). I will leave you with my latest favourite term: The Kablammo. It comes via my friend Gráinne (who uses the word Kablammo as an adjective in much the same way as my father uses arch) and it is a variation on the unnecessary use of the definite article commonly used in the term The Awesome (or Teh Awesome, if you're that kind of nerd).

And that's all I have to say about that. I know this isn't a particularly arch ending, but think of it as more of a "to be continued". Now that I have laid down some basic facts, I will probably sprinkle this blog with occasional new terms as they pop up.

So, for now at least, in the immortal words of Bugs Bunny: "That's masa del dedo del pie, false".