Seven Words That Aren't But Should Be

I like words. I really like words. No, I like, like words. But my favorite words aren’t even words at all, they’re illegitimate love children of other words that rubbed together a few too many times and, poof! New word!

To English scholars and semi-intelligent people, these are known as portmanteaux words. You might think of them as mash-ups of multiple words that together provide a whole new and useful level of description.

Of course, it can all go wrong.  “Irregardless” is a great example. If you are wondering why irregardless is being mentioned among a list of words that aren’t and you’ve been using it in e-mails, memos, at work in conversation, it’s time for you to know that everyone is laughing at you.

Irregardless is a bad portmanteaux because it is completely unnecessary – a mere bastardization of two perfectly good words; “irrespective” and “regardless”, neither one of which is in need of modification for the sake of improvement.

That example aside, not all portmanteaux words are the devil’s work. Some are actually quite ideal and should be added to the lexicon posthaste. Call the OED! Picket outside of Miriam Webster’s offices. Ah, hell, just add them to Wikipedia, that’s as far as most people go these days anyway.

#7 “Blentry” Let’s start slow. Since you’re getting an English lesson from this blog, we’ll assume this is the best way to start. Blentry is quite simply a blog entry.

See? It’s perfect. That’s why these words that aren’t words should be words. Because blentry. What else could a blentry be? It is perhaps the perfect and most useful of the modern portmanteaux words because, by definition it could not be anything other than what it is.

“I really liked your blentry today. It was very funny”, is what I imagine people would say to me if they ran across me on the street rather than trying to run over me.

Blentry advances the lexicon because it describes in a keenly effective way a modern thing that didn’t exist until recently. But because it pulls from simple words that everyone knows, it is immediately recognizable. It also makes something that used to require two words, blog entry, into only one, thus doubling our productivity and helping us win the war against liberty.

Thanks to David W. Towne Esq. for contributing “Blentry”

#6 “Fauxnitiative” takes the words faux (a real French word that means “fake”) and initiative to create something that every working person is familiar with; either because you’ve seen it or done it.

You know that person at work that is always talking about how busy they are but always seems to be playing free cell when you walk by their cube? They are the same ones who at every status meeting talk about all they have done to move the ball on their project when no one else has heard of the project. They are expressing fauxnitiative.

Fauxnitiative is a well-known and oft-used gambit to avoid doing any real work. It can be used in almost any environment. Like the littlest guy in a group of big guys talking smack about “beating ass” and such, when he has no intention of doing any of the hard work himself.

You can choose to call out a person’s fauxnitiative, but it may backfire because everyone already knows they are full of shit. It just makes you look petty by calling attention to it. Also, if you call someone else out for overplaying their fauxnitiative, someone could be right behind you ready to do the same to you. This is why fauxnitiative continues. It’s the proverbial Mexican standoff.

#5 “Expectable” is the result of a torrid affair between expect and acceptable. Something expectable is something that met your low expectations and not one little bit more. Expectable is like every meal ever served at Applebee’s. Expectable is every Michael Bay film or first dates with people who responded to your personal ad on Craigslist. You aren’t looking for much, but at least you get it.

“Hey, how are those Buffalo ranch boneless broasted chicken tips?”

“I don’t know. Fine I guess…  they’re expectable.”

Thanks to Gregory B. Gruley for contributing Expectable

#4 “Poordom” is the sublime partnership of poor and boredom. Poordom is the never-ending drudgery of being poor.

“He sat under the leak in his roof, contemplating his poordom.”

“While she wanted to join her friends at the bar, she couldn’t afford the cover charge on account of her poordom.”

You get it.

The Grapes of Wrath may have been worth reading if Steinbeck had words like poordom in his quiver to describe the zeitgeist of dustbowl America during the depression. Like all good portmanteaux words, it conveys precision and depth of meaning.

#3 “Snuzzle” might trip up some people. It’s the confluence of snot and muzzle. It is basically the stuff pet owners have to chisel off their windows at home and in the car; or instead learn to live with it and just pretend that solidified dog snot isn’t as gross as kissing your sister.

Snuzzle is mostly impervious to cleaning products as it sort of reconstitutes into a gelatinous ooze when liquid is applied. It’s best to just replace your window.

No one knows how snuzzle becomes so impossible to clean. It must be that magic combination of saliva, Beggin’ Strips and ass matter that creates some impervious ionic bond at the molecular level.

Though snuzzle is gross, it’s common. And being common makes it somewhat less disturbing, unlike the next example, which while common is creepy by definition.

#2 “Cryptcreeper” is a play on the famous “Crypt Keeper”, the animatronic host of Tales from the Crypt, an old Friday night spook show on HBO before HBO showed only boob related material after the dinner hour.

A cryptcreeper is a person way too old to be in a particular bar, trying to pick up a person from a younger demographic.

Maybe it’s the Members Only jacket, or the just past its prime toupee. Perhaps the 10 year old Bimmer that looks sorta nice in the dark of the bar parking lot, until you see the wire coat hanger holding up the muffler and the bald, mismatched tires.  Or maybe it’s the carefully studied application of popular slangs that jumped the shark a couple months ago.

A Cryptcreeper is flashing the cash to make up for the fact that he looks like an undercover operative sent by your parents to make sure you were acting like a young lady or young gentleman.

Cryptcreepers are always men, because a female cryptcreeper would be known as a cougar. And that’s almost always hot, because men are pigs and last call is coming faster than a junior on prom night.

#1 “Apostraphal” should be a word because it not only conforms to the general guidelines of being made of real words, descriptive of what it is and easy to understand, it also contributes to the defeat of one of modern man’s greatest scourges; inappropriate use of apostrophes.

It is the happy marriage of apostrophe, that little tick that is used to denote possession, contractions and all sorts of things, and apocryphal, something generally passed along as a part of the story but not considered true or verifiable.

If you are wondering why apostrophes isn’t spelled apostrophe’s, you are part of the problem. Actually, you are the problem.

These days, printed signs hanging outside of commercial buildings, presumably produced by professional corporate infographic firms, are flipping English teachers and moderately intelligent society alike the big effyou by wantonly misusing this misunderstood but well-meaning and useful punctuation mark.

Look for demonstration’s of apostraphal writing everywhere on social media site’s, blog’s and tweet’s. They’re everywhere.

Bill Uebbing's Four Seasons

November, again and I am looking for a place to hide. The impending winter is, well, impending and my sense of dread is in full hyperspace overdrive. We all know the four seasons, Spring, Summer, Autumn and Death… ok, Winter. But do you know the four seasons of Bill? Do you care? 

Strike that last question from the record. You're here, still reading, so you either care enough to care or care enough to humor me. I'm good with either. Without further ado:

The Four Seasons of Bill

New Car (Spring):

Some men find love, others are happy to stop at lust. I, being the happily married cheerfully monogamous type turn my fancy to cars. Oh how I scour the ads, online, free trader papers, stopping along the road to look at random cars parked there. Sometimes these random cars are even for sale!

My dreams jump from car to car. One day a pickup, the next a subcompact… ooh, station wagons are cool. How about an old Rolls?

Emily gets very, very nervous each New Car. For most, it's the season of beginnings, of possibilities. For Em, it's the dread of sitting across from the finance guy at a dealership signing 300 documents that essentially mean we will have to work until two weeks after we are dead to afford another depreciating "investment". 

Emily spend much of the time putting ads on Craigslist and standing on the street corner beseeching people to ask me to help them buy a new car, thus providing me my fix without any real financial burden. 

This past year, my own Father came to our rescue, allowing me to have a significant say in the choice of and negotiation for his new car. What better way for father and son to bond? 

New Car is my favorite of all the seasons.

Old Car (Summer):

Being the steward of an old car is almost as fun as buying a new car and nearly as financially ruinous. Old Car begins with a plan and ends with tennis elbow. Why tennis elbow? It's caused by the continuous 'swipe' action of the credit card, of course. Old Car means the purchase of new parts to keep the old car on the road.

This is my second favorite season. Emily likes it better, too, because for some reason, she doesn't find spending too much money on and old car to be as onerous as doing the same on a new one. 

I guess it's the same logic that makes it unacceptable in her eyes for me to smoke cigarettes, but perfectly OK to smoke cigars. Girls are funny.

Grumpy and Sick (Autumn):

Fall. What can you say about a season named after something you desperately spend most of your life to not do? Even if you call it by its bourgeois name, Autumn, it's still the association of the end of activity and the beginning of death and stasis.

You know when people say, "He lived to the fullest, even in the autumn of his life?" They say that at funerals. The autumn of things is near the end. 

"But what of the colors, Bill", you ask? Yeah, our payoff  for accepting death is two minutes of pretty colors that I can only see through squinted allergy eyes which inevitably lead to back breaking raking and picking up sticks. It's like Publishers' Clearinghouse coming to your door with the prize patrol and the balloons and the cameras just to deliver your first issue of Ladies' Home Journal.

The days are shorter. The nights are colder. The only redeeming quality of Grumpy and Sick is football. And that's almost, but not, worth it.

Death (Winter):

Winter is literally unbearable. This is why bears hibernate in the winter. Why bother? What is there to do? Snowball fights? Way more fun in theory than in practice. You know snow is just ice that didn't apply itself! Why would you want to have that thrown at you? 

There is no amount of pot roast to make up for the menace of pot holes! There is no warmth of human compassion equal to the cold of the frozen tundra… of Lambeau Field or any other place.

And shoveling? Makes raking look like a day at the zoo! 

Speaking of a day at the zoo, you know what that looks like in winter? A tableau of post apocalyptic Chernobyl… a place made the subject of many, many horror movies… for a reason! I guess you can still see the owls. They might ask "Who, who, who comes to the zoo in the middle of winter? This sucks!"

People who are merely annoyingly bad at driving become real threats to your existence. Your furnace runs constantly, making that sucking and whooshing sound which signifies all your money, which as we all know is supposed to be saved up for New Car, is going out of your 90 + year old windows. And still you are cold. And you always will be.

Football, a solace, eventually goes away in early February and we here in the cold north still have 90 full days of dark and cold to endure before New Car rolls around again.

So I'm checking out for Death. I'll see you all next New Car.