Words that ought to exist (but don't - yet)

I noticed a thread title in another group referring to yesterday as "Armisters' Day", and in the moment before I worked out what the poster meant, it occurred to me that there was a word that really has every possible qualification that it would need to be to take a full and satisfying role in the English language, if only it happened to mean something. You can easily imagine that an armister might be a lady with the right to bear arms, or perhaps a particular type of farm-worker, or an American term for a deodorant spray, or ...

I'm sure there must be a lot more of such combinations of letters that are hugely suggestive of wordness but don't quite achieve it!

I see an armister as a minor official in a cathedral. Your post made me think of the late, lamented Rambling Syd Rumpo who used many of these "words" - cordwangle, the woggler's mooly, scrope, nadjers and the like.

Armister = someone who tidies up after a dusty army.

A word often used in 1950's pulp novels by floozies when surprised, usually uttered from a barstool: 'Aw mister, it's real nice of you to say so. Armister! Get your hand off my leg! I ain't that kinda dame.'

I'd be surprised to learn that the day hadn't often been called Veterinarians' Day.

One that I saw from several college students was "throught," evidently based on what they heard instead of "throughout." I actually think the word loses nothing by being elided in that way. After "throught" has laid around for a while without calling a stir, people will probably take it for granite.

I confess, T'was I. I blame it on my over reliance on 'spell checkers'.

If you need a word for some common but undescribed situation/event/thing may I suggest

http://www.librarything.com/catalog/guido47&collection=-1&deepsearch=lif...

Guido, with apologies.

>2 abbottthomas:
Yes, "ooooaarrrrrmister" would be a good Rambling Syd word. Probably with a hint of the sense >4 bluepiano: proposes.

If I'm allowed a bit of esprit d'escalier, it could also be a good Antiques Roadshow word - "...you've got a fine example of a late Jacobean armister here, with some interesting scrollwork on the legs - if you hadn't cleaned it, it might have been worth twenty thousand at auction..."

>2 abbottthomas: Thanks for bringing up Rambling Syd Rumpo. Priceless. I listen to some of his work (which "has been spread over many fields") over and over again.

>7 thorold: But for Kenneth Williams it would probably have been bona lallies, not legs...

>8 John5918:
How red my eek is - I should have vada'd that!

>9 thorold: "Since we last met I've been where few men have been and seen what few men have seen... and got off with a five pound fine."

>10 John5918:
"May your goats be as numerous as the hairs of your nose"

(I did some listening to old recordings this weekend too)

That reminds me! Planet Rock is currently playing the whole of Pornograffitti. And the reason it reminds me is because I thought of 'lollygagging' - which comes up in one of their songs and which was new to me, as a Brit.

I love the first citation in the OED for lollygagging: In December 1868 the Northern Vindicator of Estherville, Iowa, loudly lambasts "The lascivious lolly-gagging lumps of licentiousness who disgrace the common decencies of life by their love-sick fawnings at our public dances." Wikipedia helpfully informs us that the population of Estherville at the time of the 1870 census was 168 (it's around 6000 now) — there can't be many communities that size capable of sustaining so much alliteration and such an exciting night-life!

You want to be careful making words up. I was just reading about an Oxford don who got bored marking entrance exams. He wrote down a sentence: In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Then he felt that he ought to figure out what a hobbit was, and we all know what that led to...

I used to have a job that had me driving around town mindlessly at night. One night I was considering as I drove what the word clique might mean if it were spelled cleek. Unusually for me, I looked it up confirming that there is such a word.

I am sure that the definition I read then said that it was part of an oarlock. I have a memory of telling about this to a fellow who had crewed in college and recalled that he knew of the cleek although he had forgetten it.

Now when I look it up, the word is there, but there is no such definition. When I google 'parts of an oarlock' there is no part labeled cleek.

Robert

Probably a mis-remembering, because your rowing colleague was probably thinking of cleats which would be the shoes if they are fixed to the boat (rather than just straps when you're using your own footgear). Cyclists have cleats for attaching their shoes to the pedals.

>16 Noisy: A cleat is also a nautical term independently of shoes.

>15 Mr.Durick: - >17 John5918:
I didn't know this, but apparently a cleat was originally just a wedge or projection on the surface of something to stop something else from slipping. Hence the modern nautical use for a device you use for securing a rope on a ship, and the (originally American, but now also British) use of "cleat" to mean a cleated shoe, especially a cycling shoe.

Another minor mystery: why do the Americans use "oarlock" and the British "rowlock"? It's one of those weird cases where the Americans have kept a very old word and the British invented a new one ("rowlock" only seems to have appeared in the 1740s). Presumably British sailors found the new word useful when they were looking for a rhyme, whilst their American colleagues didn't approve of such frivolities...

While we're minding the rowlocks, thole is an excellent word that ought to be used more often.

I'd only come across cleek as one of those obsolete types of golf-club that P.G. Wodehouse has so much fun with; apparently it's also some sort of hook for hanging things up.

>18 thorold: So a cleek is a cleat hung sideways?

>19 2wonderY:
Possibly - some of the time, anyway. I don't think my shoes turn into cleeks when I'm riding my recumbent, nor would lever and cam type cleats be much use as hooks, but if you have a horn type cleat on the mainmast, you can hang a wet raincoat from it in harbour, so that might well count as a cleek.

Sometimes the state of American politicians is such that there are no words to describe how foul some are. So I coined one, scuzzwort.

Def. One so assiduously despicable as to be draped in slime. i.e., a repulsive bottom-feeder

Feel free.

>18 thorold:

thole is an excellent word that ought to be used more often.

Seamus Heaney revived that one in his Beowulf translation.

According to a friend of mine, an ex-girlfriend of his, in that past year or so, coined Tea-hadist to define extreme right-wing conservatives (in the U.S., I presume.) It was the first I heard it.

>23 WholeHouseLibrary:
Maybe she's a bit exer than he's letting on - a quick Google suggests that "teahadist" must have been coined in 2010 or 2011 and reached its peak of popularity in 2013.

It’s all a lot of flingam: why nonsense words make us laugh (Guardian)

Wibble.

When my daughter was 3 she asked me to remove a spider from her room that was cribbling across the wall. All of my family have adopted the word. Spiders don't walk, they cribble.

>26 darrow: Good word! I may adopt it too.

Aren't children that age fascinating? Reminds me that when my oldest was 4 she was outside playing in the autumn leaves, and I asked her what she was doing when she came back in. She described it as "squirreling about."

My kid sister used to say "basketti" and "mazagine," so the whole family took up using those words for a decade or two. My older sister went through a deliberate phase of calling potato chips "padooda dips" but it didn't catch on.

Another nice one from a recent thread title: soverwhelmed
- I guess it's simply an elision of "so overwhelmed", but Google tells me there's a blog that uses it to stand for "secretly overwhelmed".
- sover is "sleep" in Swedish, so you could plausibly make a case for soverwhelmed=overcome by sleep (this has a nice resonance with "sofa", of course, even though that is totally unrelated and comes from Arabic)
- there's an old Scots adjective sover meaning "sure, safe", so maybe soverwhelmed might also be the state you're in when someone wraps you in a big, cosy blanket...?

Ooh that's an interesting one, thorold. What first occurred to me was that the elision was a typo and that the 'secretly overwhelmed' use if it's any connection at all came from someone who didn't know it was a typo. OMG Justin talked to me after class!!! and I was trying to be cool and not to show how soverwhelmed I was!!

Sover is a verb in Swedish so I'll settle for 'slumber-taken' though I've no idea whether that's a thing. Shall enjoy looking into derivation of sover in Scots tomorrow; cheers.

>30 bluepiano:
You might also want to consider the possibility that it's a corruption of shofarwhelmed - the condition of being suddenly awoken by a musical instrument during a religious service.

If I could bring myself to use emoticons, I'd be googling the one for 'groan' now.

Frowning Face with Open Mouth Emoji (U+1F626)

I think we need the word Antisept, meaning to apply antiseptic. By analogy with Disinfect, to apply disinfectant.

>34 dud5ers:
Possibly, but there would be a great danger of confusing it with the noun antesept (the sherry taken as an apéritif by Oxford dons before their seven o'clock dinner), or of making a false association with antisceptic (a magical unguent that protects you against rational ideas).

>35 thorold: *****. I suppose those Aloysius's and St John's dine so early on account of their great age.

'Dowering' demands a participial antecedent, so 'cringering': A proposal of marriage made at a public event, often a televised one.