Tag Archives: list making

We’ve Got Your G.O.A.T.

Today’s guest post comes from Barbara in Robbinsdale.

Ah, Babooners are a word-loving bunch, and if they don’t find the word they seek in the common lexicon, they will create their own. To keep track of these, we occasionally update our “Glossary of Accepted Terms” , or G.O.A.T.

This acronym was coined by our Alpha Baboon, Dale (he of the CAP – see ACRONYMS, below). For the uninitiated:  when we started this “dictionary”, we had a couple of goat farmers among our personnel (welcome back, Cynthia), which explains a little. Jacque and I collaborated on the first one, and I’ve kept it going, sporadically. Here we are past Summer Solstice of 2015, two years since the last update in May of 2013.

Sometimes the newly created word is the result of a typo; others are just sheer cleaverness . The dates are left in, in case you have a lot of time on your hands and wish to find out what the HECK was going on at the time.

I now have a system – copy and paste the new word into a M’soft Word file with all the information I’ll need, and then edit like crazy when I’ve collected enough to make a post. It appeals to my love for making order out of chaos.

To visit the Glossary, go to top right, under The Trail Photo.

Here are the latest additions:

Accidentalics – i.e. “Ooops… unintended italics.  Do we have a word for that?”   December 16, 2013 at 11:12 pm 

Achedemic – Learning something the hard way, as in “she seems to be heading off in more achedemic directions…”          September 3, 2014 at 8:17 am 

Binoculookers – a device that helps you see farther than you usually can. For instance “Then she asked her dad if she could ‘use his binoculookersto view the bear in the night sky’ ”.   February 23, 2015 at 12:10 pm 

Crimea River – a river in Crimea, OR a sad song. “If you’re aim is to turn this geopolitical episode into a musical, don’t forget to include Crimea River as one of the numbers.”  (unfortunately, I lost track of the date for this one.) .March 24, 2014 at 7:40 pm 

Disphasia – the condition of being out of synch with others of your generation  (did I get this right, Clyde?), as in “The gap has created some interesting disphasia in our life.”   June 23, 2015

Distraughtitude – The condition of being distraught, as in:  “I’m sure that the distraughtitude of the usual suspects will probably be more pronounced.”   June 3, 2015 at 8:09 am

Experience Loyal – An alternative to being  brand loyal:   “I am experience-loyal  Give me a good experience, and I’m bound to come back.”   November 25, 2013 at 11:58 am 

fauxtimming  November 25, 2013 at 3:34 pm – “a disorder having to do with the inability to remember to capitalize and or punctuate. on occasion there may be a hand held device that intercedes and give the impression of english etiquette but it is an illusion. it is called fauxtimming. [timism] * and fauxtimming are not taught but can be easily implemented with any standard keyboard and a computer that has a disarm feature on its spell checker.”       October 6, 2014 at 11:16 am

Hygge, hyggelig – A Danish word that doesn’t have an English counterpart:  “Hygge” is part state of mind, part physical coziness that includes comfort and warmth, and good smells. As we get close to Christmas, a batch of gløg, a few Christmas cookies, soothing music and, again, a lot of lit candles help make things  hyggelig  …”       December 21, 2013 at 8:03 am

Mingy, minginginess – “Being skimpy, paring everything just inside of “enough”. Rhymes with stingy, and means about the same but not quite, as there is also an implication of deception-pretended generosity. (This is actually in the dictionary, folks.)”  October 22, 2014 at 11:36 am 

Mushroomisticism – slow cooking a mushroomy dish for hours at low heat.  “im tackling suaces as my next challenge, that and mushroomisticism.” February 5, 2015 at 7:49 am

Multi-nontasking – looking around and seeing all the things one hasn’t managed to get done. August 1, 2013 at 7:15 pm       i.e. “I can sit with a cat on my lap while listening to a ball game.”  August 2, 2013 at 12:03 am

Procrasti-tasks – “things you don’t want to do, but you do them to avoid something you want to do less. For example, if you have laundry to fold which has been sitting for days but you also have a grant request to write, suddenly the laundry is folded.”   January 12, 2015 at 10:37 am

timism – (from G.O.A.T.) – An ambiguity in which you are not sure whether there was a typo, or an intentional misspelling, as in “My favorite timism of the week is ‘Talk snout dysfunctional’…” (See Dec. 23, 2010 TBB for rich, complete discussion.)

To-do-plegia – Wikipedia uses “plegia” to describe paralysis in which all voluntary movement is lost.” To-do-plegia involves a to-do list, as in “I need lots of good energy sent my way this week. … [to accomplish] the to-do list…”     September 8, 2014 at 10:31 am 

Turbo-mouse – A rodent capable of monumental achievement, say, climbing with a malted milk ball to a place 12’ off the ground.   “My apologies to the turbo-mouse if I am not giving credit where it is due.” November 25, 2014 at 6:23 am 

Unfronding – In response to Dale’s hand-weeding description: I need to confront the weeds personally, face to frond”, there was this comment: “These days we call what you do unfronding the weeds.” August 5, 2013 at 7:06 am        DC: “Hah! Just think, I could have wasted all those hours on Facebook instead!”

Weasel words – Product description lingo that disguises some aspect of the contents of a food, as in “If a product is described as chocolatey, that’s an almost certain indicator that there’s no actual chocolate in it.”   February 28, 2014 at 11:29 am

Worm wigs – a very creative typo that created this mental image:  “I wonder if I wore a worm wig if that could solve my winter composting problems – I could have compost-eating worms right on top of my head.”   March 27, 2014 at 1:12 pm

Yikes meter – a measure of… take your pick:  outrageousness, offensiveness, or unbelievability that causes a Baboon to say “Well, that’s way up there on the yikes meter.”   March 22, 2015 at 9:58 pm

ACRONYMS:

CAT – I admit to having Compulsive Acronym Tendencies     February 21, 2015

CRAPO – Calendar Reactive Anniversary Pile On   November 22, 2013

When you feel compelled to make a list, what’s on it?