Pseudo-title

I've learned a lot from the neighbor who lives across our back fence. I've learned that the raccoon we've seen once or twice in our yard lives in the fruit tree in his yard, and the skunk we smell occasionally used to live under our shed, but the previous owners filled it in so the skunk moved two yards down under a much larger, less gravel-filled shed. And the woodchuck that's been leaving bitemarks on the mushrooms in our yard lives under our next-door neighbors' deck.

This last bit of information I confirmed independently when I saw the little bugger twice in the past week. Both times it was in the neighbors' yard, and both times it ended up making a break for the deck when it heard something threatening (like a 2-year-old with a golf club headed in its general direction).

Woodchucks moving at top speed aren't something I get to see up close too frequently - usually they're just standing by the side of the highway as I whizz by at high speeds. But watching this one up close ... okay, from 30 yards away ... has given me the insight that woodchucks must be distantly related to flying squirrels. They have so much flabby skin between their forelegs and hindlegs that they don't run, scamper, or scurry - they flollop. It's a speedy flollop, but a flollop nonetheless.

When I mentioned this to one of the contractors who was checking out my kitchen, he wasn't familiar with the word, and I realized that this was yet another pseudo-word in my vocabulary. In this case, it's a Douglas Adams creation, from Life, the Universe and Everything*:

It was a large mattress, and probably one of quite high quality. Very few things actually get manufactured these days, because in an infinitely large Universe such as, for instance, the one in which we live, most things one could possibly imagine and a lot of things one would rather not, grow somewhere.... [Mattresses] are large, friendly, pocket-sprung creatures that live quite private lives in the marshes of Sqornshellous Zeta. Many of them get caught, slaughtered, dried out, shipped out and slept on. None of them seems to mind this and all of them are called Zem. ... The mattress flolloped around. This is a thing that only live mattresses in swamps are able to do, which is why the word is not in common usage. It flolloped in a sympathetic sort of way, moving a fair-sized body of water as it did so.

Another Adams-ism that I use with alarming frequency is "dongle." As in, "That outlet has to have an $8 child-proof cover instead of the little olastic plug, because the stupid DustBuster power cord has a dongle on the end of it."

Some words that I use all the time I actually didn't know were made-up, at least until I married Jason and found out that "kaslonchwise" isn't a generally accepted term meaning "out of alignment," as in, 'Crap, I the cabinet door is hanging kaslonchwise again.'

Some of the uncommon words in my vocabulary come from friends ("schlick - to use a flexible device such as a spatula or finger to get every last bit of ice cream or other food out of a container," as in, "Can I schlick the pudding spoon?") and family ("spinkle," which is what my cousin did as a 3-year-old when trying to apply colored sugar to cookies ... 'spinkle, spinkle, spinkle!').

A few have found their way into common slang, such as (follow links at your own risk - Urban Dictionary is not exactly a clean site, but at least there's no porn) 'ginormous,' 'skeezy,' 'gigundous,' and 'bajillion.' Other definitions that I'll let you look up for yourself: flump, squidgy, futz, wifty, thingus, kludge, and a really bad definition of "skeezix" that I may hold against my mother forever.

And, of course, I know a few pseudo-words that I refuse to use on general principles. Such as "hork," a friend's term for gulping down large quantities of food in a short time. Sorry, Wendlings, the proper term is "snarf," and the folks at Urban Dictionary back me up, at least if you count the number of definitions that match mine for each word. And there are only a handful of people in the world who understand that "rax" is an extremely uncommon word for "what you feel like doing after eating at a Rax restaurant."

I still have a few words that are my own, including such wonders as "murph" - what you say when you are frustrated/pissed/tired/grumpy and can't explain why, usually growled while collapsing on soft furniture with alcohol and/or chocolate in hand, as in "She didn't take a nap today. Murph." Oh, and "betweeners" are the sheets of tissue paper that come stacked between business cards ... you look really dorky if you don't remove the betweeners before you hand out cards. Ootzle means "squish" or "squeeze," as in "I think there's enough room for you to ootzle behind me." And "kaslonchwise," which I inherited from my parents but use frequently enough to claim as my own.

And in case you're wondering, I didn't come up with all of these off the top of my head. I'm just dorky enough that I started collecting the pseudo-words a few years ago, an they're on an index card on my bulletin board. Yep, I'm just that dorky.



*I had to flip through 350 pages of The More Than Complete Hitchhiker's Guide to find the citation. I have a lot of time on my hands, apparently, and nothing better to do than find citations for words that don't exist to post on a blog that a handful of people read. Procrastination is sooooo much fun!