A.Word.A.Day -- AWADmail Issue 1040

Putinvasion: An undeclared war.
-Trevor Jackson Nanaimo, Canada (jawdbc gmail.com)

I suffer from Raynaud’s disease and especially during winter my hands get cold and numb. Hence, I often ask my husband to warm my hands by making a handwich.
-Maja-Stine Foged, Vejle, Denmark (majafoged hotmail.com)

Snaux: Fake snow. Commercial artificial snow flakes or powder for use in craft and display projects.
-Beth Tuttle, St. Louis, Missouri (macbef swbell.net)

Here’s one we use in my family, suffricient (suffer + sufficient), to mean “enough suffering”.
-Mónica Ruiz, Aguascalientes, Mexico (monirumu gmail.com)

A friend coined Ds. (pronounced dizz) from Dr. and Ms. for a female doctor (in her case, a PhD).
-Liza Levy, Paris, Kentucky (sparkydoc3.14159 gmail.com)

I’ve always liked innuendiary: a comment thrown into a conversation to make it explode.
-Glenn Glazer, Felton, California (glenn.glazer gmail.com)

My husband likes to lie in bed in the evening to watch TV with his eyes closed. He calls it listwatchening because he’s watching by listening.
-Linda Washington, Big Bear City, California (lwash2 hotmail.com)

I use the term carcolepsy (car + narcolepsy) for those who quickly fall asleep as car passengers (not drivers!)
-Martha Brown, Santa Cruz, California (mtbrown17 gmail.com)

Eight years ago my late husband, Bruce Hiscock and I (Helen Dickerson) were married. This brought about many giggles as we invented ways to combine our last names. We, of course, left our last names unchanged. However, because we were traveling a lot for ski trips and bike trips, Bruce suggested we call ourselves The Stickershocks.
-Helen Dickerson, Poughkeepsie, New York (helen_dickerson hotmail.com)

Testilying: Testifying under oath.
-Michael Strong, Santa Cruz, California (mastrong ucsc.edu)

I recently saw this sign in a neighbor’s lawn: Please No Tresspooping.
-Dennis Berry, Sanibel, Florida (denniswayneberry yahoo.com)

Engrage: To stimulate use by triggering rage. When I was in television the local news mandate was: If it bleeds, it leads. In social media the algos “enrage to engage”. So, to engage users on social, the algos bend toward enragement. “My twitter feed engrages me every time I open the app, but I still open the #* %* app!”
-Cyril E. Vetter, Baton Rouge, Louisiana (cevetter hotmail.com)

Tirate, a blend of tired and irate: angry because exhausted. Similar to the widely used hangry (hungry and angry).
-Barbara Hoffman, New York, New York (bhoffman cov.com)

Momologue, an extended monologue directed at and for the entertainment of one’s mother. There came a time when I visited my elderly mother, over 100, and we reached a new stage. She no longer entered into conversation. I kept chirping along nonetheless -- about family events, her friends, etc. -- to fill the void.
-Jean Lambert, West Newbury, Massachusetts (j-lambert comcast.net)

As I watch a baby crow and its parents in our big trees and on our roof and decks, mapa is my word for the parent who is feeding the young one. Since both parents look after the fledglings, it could be either one.
-Denise Nereida, Vancouver, Canada (nereidadenise191 gmail.com)

In my novel Personal Days (2008), a character talks about getting a deprotion, an ostensible promotion at work that “shares most of the hallmarks of a demotion”. My editor actually coined the phrase; alas, it did not catch on.
-Ed Park, New York, New York (thedizzies gmail.com)

Twalk (walk + talk): It’s what I do with friends instead of meeting for coffee/lunch, etc.
-Anne Kohlbry, Olympia, Washington (apkohlbry hotmail.com)

I had a writer friend whose husband would pick her up from our writers’ group and we’d say her hUber was coming.
-Karol Ruth Silverstein, West Hollywood, California (karolinas aol.com)

Chaucerbury Tales.
-Gail Reynolds, Dade City, Florida (reynolds9 fastmail.com)

Nostesia (nostalgia + amnesia): Remembering only the good stuff (or forgetting all the bad).
-Ginny Wallace, Jefferson City, Missouri (ginny.k.wallace gmail.com)

I am an online teacher and have the pleasure to teach a supersmart Chinese student named Amber. We did some lessons about some superstitions from around the world. She was five at the time. She said they were stupidstitions.
-Eunice Walker, Chesterfield, UK (eunicewalker mac.com)

Aphartheid: Forced isolation of an individual because of gas.
-John Pacheco, Gardner, Massachusetts (j_pacheco mwcc.mass.edu)

Smogation: Smog (already a blend) + vacation. It was coined back in Beijing in Dec 2016 when the smog levels were high so many schools were closed. Therefore, teachers were given an unexpected vacation but could not travel... a type of staycation? Caused by smog... hence smogation.
-Andy J. McIntosh, Suzhou, China (ajmci hotmail.com)

My husband combined malady and calamity to create malamity, a disastrous illness, such as when you get sick at a really inconvenient time or place. Example: “His stomach flu on safari was a malamity.”
-Joan Reisman-Brill, New York, New York (jreismanbrill gmail.com)

Ubiquidipity: When something totally unique that you came across serendipitously suddenly becomes ubiquitous.
-Amelia de Bie, Melbourne, Australia (amde0025 gmail.com)

One portmanteau I use all the time is queasy: quick + easy. And I take issue with any pushback of “But it is already a word with a radically different meaning.”
My version of queasy is great because it’s meta: the portmanteau itself is an instance of making things quick and easy -- who wants to use three words and four syllables to say something that could be expressed in one two-syllable word?
-Scott Jordan, Des Moines, Washington (scojo78 gmail.com)

Floordrobe (floor + wardrobe), a convenient place to keep clothes instead of hanging them up properly. Especially useful during prolonged change of season, when (for example) it’s too easy to put winter clothes away and then find that warmer summer days have not, after all, arrived.
-Griselda Mussett, Kent, UK (griseldacmussett gmail.com)

Our four-year-old came up with hornk (honk the horn). That was 53 years ago, and it’s been in our family vocabulary ever since. Many thanks for your word-er-ful lessons. (I had to hyphenate there, as my spell check program is insistent).
-Marilyn Hartman, Chapel Hill, North Carolina (marilynhartman1066 gmail.com)

A board member was addressing recruitment/retention. Instead of wasting any time on the matter, they addressed it as an issue of recrution.
-Paula Budnick, Wynnewood, Pennsylvania (pbudnick15 gmail.com)

When I was babysitting my three-year-old niece, she brought her shoes to me and asked if they were crockeyed. I think her wonderful mind merged crooked and cockeyed. She’s 64 now and it still makes me smile.
-Penni Fromm, Boca Raton, Florida (pennifromm yahoo.com)

I’m a Seattle native, living abroad in Barcelona! My portmanteaux is circumbobulate (discombobulate + circumnavigate). We travel a lot, and there’s a moment when you’re completely lost in a foreign city and you try to navigate to a destination, but you’re just going in circles.
-Denise Jones, Barcelona, Spain (dj.jonestown gmail.com)

Anglitarian: A word I came up with to describe my church, which was founded in Boston by Anglicans during colonial times, but which has subsequently become Christian Unitarian in affiliation.
-Ray Hardin, Boston, Massachusetts (xray73 gmail.com)

Adamentia (adamant + dementia): The state of being insistently incorrect when describing a historical event. Commonly used by spouses.
-Lisa Thors, Brookline, Massachusetts (lisathors comcast.net)

My son-in-law, James Hyde, accidentally combined devious and deceitful into deceivious several years ago. This new word quickly became a staple in my bag of useful words, inasmuch as the meaning is instantly grasped.
-William C. Zoller, Sarasota, Florida (zozz1 mac.com)

Right on cue there are national stories about President Biden and Jill Biden fexting or fighting/arguing via text messages. Googling the word shows that the word exists with several different meanings which would not be suitable for a family-friendly website. However, I believe as Jill Biden and the President use the word, it is a new coining.
-Abraham Marcus, New York, New York (acmarcus gmail.com)

My favorite is the Japanese loanword karaoke because of the circuitous route the word has taken to be formed of Japanese and English parts. Kara means empty, as in karate (empty hand). Oke is a shortened form of ookesutora, a transliteration of English orchestra, an English loan word in Japanese. So that part of karaoke has crossed the Pacific from the US to Japan and back again.
I lived in Japan as a translator in the 70s when karaoke was just becoming popular, and sometimes inflicted my rendition of Japanese folk songs on unsuspecting patrons at izakaya in Tokyo.
-F. Avery Bishop, Redmond Washington (fabishop outlook.com)

My daughter came up with decoramental for decorative and ornamental. She used it to describe a balcony inside our local Olive Garden restaurant that contained a fancy little table and chairs that could not possibly be used by customers. It also works as a term for “over-decorated to the point of insanity”.
-Janet Wooters Popish, Grand Junction, Colorado (jcwpopish yahoo.com)

Blursing (blessing + curse). I use it when there is a gift that comes with a challenge or an event that has both positive and negative aspects. Several years after the death of my parents, my siblings and I were contacted by a company that searches for unclaimed funds and learned that there was a large amount of money in some stocks we did not know about. We were delighted and excited about the blessing of extra money. Of course, the company took its share of the funds for finding the funds and then the Internal Revenue Service decided that a significant amount of the funds were due the government. We had to employ a tax attorney to help with the discrepancy and after many letters and anxiety, we each received a tiny fraction of the funds and the IRS now scrutinizes everything we do. That was a true blursing.
-Julia Zanon, Denver, Colorado (juliazanon comcast.net)

I have NOT come up with this word. But I love it so much -- and my cats Luna and Guinness do, too -- that I wanted to be sure you know about it. Incapussitated is a combination of “incapacitated” and “puss” and refers to your inability to move when a cat has settled on your lap. “I told my husband, ‘You’ll have to answer the door, please. I’m incapussitated.’”
-Loretta Carlson, Bear, Delaware (lscarlson mac.com)