A.Word.A.Day -- AWADmail Issue 850

Blividiot: an oblivious idiot; coined ca. 25 years ago while trying to drive through Harvard Square without running over one of the undergrads mindlessly wandering into the street.
-Miriam Paschetto, Passaic, New Jersey (mirotheengineer gmail.com)

My blend word for today, coined to describe Kavanaugh’s tearful rant:
bombfraztic. A combination of bombastic (meaning high-sounding but of little meaning) and frazzled.
-Chip Taylor (via website comments)

Conflusion: I recently used this word in a sermon to mean the state of mind that occurs when church tradition is confused with reasoning based on facts. I had fun.
-Rev. Donna Jarrell, Huntingdon, Pennsylvania (jarrell.donna gmail.com)

Many years ago I started using HUGGLE with my birds: hug and snuggle.
-Bonnie Jay, Rogue River, Oregon (bonnie estarbird.com)

I taught instrumental music for forty years in central Pennsylvania. I also insisted on correct English and helped students to expand their vocabulary. When asked, I simply explained that I wanted them to sound intelligent whether speaking or playing.
I don’t have to tell anyone on AWAD that “like” is used excessively as a filler. At my wit’s end I told one student that she was “likquacious”. I blended “like” and “loquacious” and it made sense to her (an eighth grader) so I continued to use it. I certainly had enough opportunity!
-John R. Kovalchik, Petersburg, Pennsylvania (jkt6tuba aol.com)

Here in Styria, Austria, there is a life-sized iron figure of a moose, which stands overlooking a highway. Some joker painted white vertical stripes on it a few years ago. The German word for moose is Elch, and the German for zebra is Zebra. Since then we call this animal a Zelch.
-Christine Whittlesey, Gleisdorf, Austria (christine.whittlesey aon.at)

Emptybody: an omnivore who would be most healthy eating fruits and vegetables, but has so little capability for empathy that they actually enjoy eating a piece of something hacked off of a very recently living fellow sentient being who felt pain as harshly as they themselves can feel pain.
Usage:
* Upon returning home from their weekly church service, a family of emptybodies sat down to eat big rare steaks as they laughed and joked with each other.
* On their way to a campaign rally to support their favorite race-baiting candidate, a number of the emptybodies stopped by the fast-food place for a quick hamburger.
* A group of emptybodies took assault rifles into the woods in order to have lots of fun killing wild animals.
-William Eugene Claburn, West Windsor, New Jersey (nowgene gmail.com)

One of my students, years ago, inadvertently created the word flamboisterous, and I still think it is wonderfully expressive.
-Cindy Watter, Napa, California (hedgehogccw gmail.com)

I came up with the word jonning some years ago to describe the kind of movement that comes between running and jogging. It’s a pretty useless word, I realise, because jogging and running have rather porous boundaries, and so there’s no real middle space. But when I’m out running, I’m often trying to define to myself what exactly jonning is -- I’ll be going at a certain pace, and I’ll think that it’s too fast to be called a jog and too slow to be called a run -- it’s the jon, then!
-Sahir Avik D’souza, Mumbai, India (sahiravik gmail.com)

trumpugly: So hideously distortedly sickeningly ugly that the word for what is being described makes the face of the describer grimace in an ugly way to even say it.
Use of the phrase “Trump ugly” from which the word is derived has been used sufficiently frequently by now that turning it into a single permanent English word seems both appropriate and inevitable.
-Eugene Claburn, West Windsor, New Jersey (nowgene gmail.com)

May I offer my own poor contribution? I once worked in an organisation that had a terrible problem dealing with difficult questions. I coined the term postpended from postponed and suspended, to be used whenever we said we’d deal with a tricky question later, but actually everyone knew we’d never deal with it. The organisation eventually folded.
-Oscar Franklin, London, UK (oscar.franklin actionaid.org)

A friend once told me that he and his girlfriend were celebrating their two-month anniversary together. Since anniversary refers to an annual event I suggested that he call it a lunaversary, since it was a monthly event.
-Tom Furgas, Youngstown, Ohio (tofu4879 gmail.com)

I propose idiotyncrasy from idiot + idiosyncrasy. To mean “the way of behavior of an idiot”.
-José Luis Palacios, Albuquerque, New Mexico (jopalal gmail.com)

One of my favourite portmanteaus is from the comic strip 9 Chickweed Lane, used as a disparaging term by its main antagonists for their athletically adroit but academically challenged classmates.
That term is troglojock, a blend of troglodyte and jock. It joined my vocabulary upon my first encounter with it, quite likely because of the empathy I felt for its users, as I and my best friend shared our high school with several instances of what appeared to be anachronisms -- forms of hominins such as Homo Neanderthalensis.
-Craig Dyck, Calgary, Canada (co3dyck gmail.com)

Itch 22: condition where the only cure for an ailment is with another condition of equal misery.
-Howard Kessler, New York, New York, (andyjuil aol.com)

Infosule: a capsule of information.
-Kaneez Zehra Razavi, Bhopal, India (kaneez.razavi gmail.com)

My children often asked what “they were” as they grew up in Nicaragua with two passports, cultures, and identities. While there is a colloquial expression in Spanish, there is not really a popular one in English. Nica-gringo or gringo-nica is what I told them they were and to be proud of it!
-Mary Helen Espinosa, Managua, Nicaragua (maryhelen.espinosa usa.net)

I use the term reptilican to describe the political party formerly known as the Republican Party.
-Wilfred Gladstone, Toronto, Canada (wgladstone sympatico.ca)

Our daughter coined déjà vuitton, which is the feeling you get, while standing at an airport baggage carousel, that you’ve seen this designer bag go around before.
-Michael B. Kahan, Stanford, California (mkahan stanford.edu)

My wife and I have coined a word for the phenomenon of people racing to their local food stores, like locust, upon hearing there’s a blizzard in the forecast. They then go to their neighborhood food store, clearing the shelves of bread, bottles of water, meat, vegetables, etc. We call this phenomenon snoarding (snow + hoarding).
PS: According to Google, the word snoarding exists but only in the context of the recreational activity of snow boarding.
-Russ Schneider, New Rochelle, New York (russell.m.schneider gmail.com)

Club EstroTesto: Any gathering of teenagers.
Teenagers of same sex: EstroEstro / TestoTesto
-Janie Bragg (janebragg728 gmail.com)

I was explaining to someone the other day that our hens had stopped laying due to age and had therefore reached henopause. I felt very clever and original until following your advice and goggled it. Someone else was also clever and original...
-Catherine Dempsey, Newfoundland, Canada (fergusanne hotmail.com)

My son created the word fridgering, a combination of freezing and shivering.
-Eve Rifkah, Worcester, Massachusetts (erifkah48 gmail.com)

Here’s one I coined many years ago: therpopeter. It’s the little plastic device found in grocery store chickens that pops up when the bird is done. It’s a combination of thermometer and pop. (Plus, of course, the pun on “mom” and “pop”.)
-David Director, Media, Pennsylvania (thedirectors verizon.net)

Guanacolía, the title of my 2012 novel, is a term I coined blending melancolía and guanaco--an animal native to South America, close to the llama but, most relevant to this context, also the nickname given to the Salvadorians, pointing to their dedication to work. Guanacolía unfolds over the course of the Salvadorian Civil War (1980-1992) during which Monseñor Óscar Romero was assassinated as he celebrated mass in San Salvador.
-Sylvie Larimore de Lara, Albuquerque, New Mexico (sylvielarimoredelara gmail.com)

Recepted is a combination of received and accepted. Perhaps there is no need to say something has been received if one is accepting it, but I like it. I recepted your challenge.
-Lisa McGrath, Towson, Maryland (mile88lisa me.com)

Hostilipitality: Pushing guests to consume food and/or drink to the point of discomfort.
One day, my brother-in-law (from a culture that highly values hospitality) showed us his new apartment. Once we were in the door, he realized he had nothing to feed us. Alarmed, he thought he would at least offer us something to drink, but they had not yet stocked up on coffee or tea. He checked the refrigerator: no juice. Water? Filter not yet installed! We kept saying it was fine, it was ok, we didn’t need anything, while he desperately searched the cupboards for something -- anything. Finally, he found a bottle of Scotch and insisted we have some. I protested that making us drink Scotch at 10 am was not hospitality. It was... I searched for the word... hosti... And he said, “Hostilipitality!” We use the word to this day.
-Teresa Dybvig, Stony Brook, New York (tdybvig gmail.com)

I refer to those unwanted calls as pham: phone spam.
-Liza Levy, Paris, Kentucky (sparkydoc3.14159 gmail.com)

I actually found this word in an article describing a soap opera wedding: Coronation Street is bringing us the wedding of Tracy Barlow and Steve McDonald this week, and you can bet it’s going to be absolutely disasteriffic.
While it’s a disaster for the characters involved, it makes for terrific viewing.
-Brad Beam, Belle, West Virginia (b.beam suddenlink.net)