Invented words and phrases (by me) - a small collection

Sometimes the existing language won't do and you have to create a new word, or one suggests itself. A lot of the time it's just recombining prefixes, infixes and suffixes but occasionally one that I quite like emerges. I'm sure you have your own, here are mine. If you tell me yours I might add a section at the bottom for them :)

While you're listening enjoy the excellent poomphing sounds of Groove Armada's Chicago.



Apostroppy - people who get extra miffed with misplaced apostrophe's (see what I did there!). Inspired by @PenguinGalaxy's misspelling of 'apostrope'

Damplitude - a measure of how hard it's raining, from how high the drops bounce on the pavement

DNAouement - the conclusion of a Jeremy Kyle show

Flim-flammable - a phrase looking for a use, without much hope of a resolution unless there are some good fire myths it might be applied to

Lipidome / lipidomics - I came up with this in 2000 after attending a conference on lipid chemistry. Around that time proteome (and later metabolome) was all the rage I think and I, being the only lipid chemist in the department, jokingly suggested the lipidome - which has since become a real word. I doubt I was the first to think of it! [Edit - I can confirm it was in the academic literature before I 'invented' it independently.] The lipid-ome is the full complement of all lipids (eg cell membrane lipids).

Malheureuse legumes - reaching for a description for poisonous mushrooms during an O Level French oral exam in which I had to role-play the sister of a boy who'd eaten them in the forest. I'd forgotten the word 'champignon'. Fortunately I never had to use it as the examiner used the correct word in the preliminary introductions to the role play.

Quantumacious - the absolute determination, despite no evidence or even evidence to the contrary, that your particularly brand of quackery can be explained by 'quantum' something or other

Monthabetically - my efforts to solve the fact that the months of the year are not alphabetic (and a column with January and May in it won't naturally re-order by calendar date) so I've renamed them Anuary, Bebruary, Charm, Dapril, Ey, Fune, Guly, Haugust, Iptember, Joctober, Movember, Zecember for my own filing purposes. These days I tend to just go with Bruary for Bebruary, there's no need to overdo it.

'ping it me-wards' - please send me a copy. I don't really know what I was thinking there

Teledelegates - people attending a conference solely via the Twitter hashtag

Timeato - my preferred rendering of Pomodoro, the productivity tool named after a tomato-shaped kitchen timer. 

Mulling over how I can monetise the observation that another word for Pomodoro (as in https://t.co/JpsQ4WLp5y) is Timeato ;)

— Jo Brodie (@JoBrodie) September 14, 2014

A 'timeato'

Whirritation - persistent helicopters overhead (to be honest I do quite like the sound, especially if Chinooks though they never seem to hover sadly), often heard early on Sunday mornings at the London Marathon which runs through bits of Blackheath near where I live. Those can be quite whirritating.

Linguistic not-quite-jargon - searching for a word to describe this

Edit: 14 Mar 2023:

Cleavage is a great one! These are exercises I like to bring up whenever I am talking about communication with scientists. My faves?

- cell (can have 3 meanings can you guess them all)?
- protein
- stem (also 3 meanings)
- fatigue https://t.co/7argpwpdgp

— Heather Doran, PhD (@hapsci) March 14, 2023

 

Edit: 7 Jan 2021: I was chatting with my friend / colleague Jane yesterday evening after a computing training event we'd run in which she'd mentioned (she was the course leader) an interesting observation about teaching programming to young primary kids: use 'task' instead of 'problem' and 'run' instead of 'execute'. I mentioned my notion about everyday words causing more problems than jargon, because at least jargon tells you it's jargon (see post below) and she said that educators have been using the word 'overloaded' for ages, so I'm adopting that with immediate effect :)

Edit: 1 May 2014: Just spotted this rather good tweeted picture showing 'what scientists say' versus 'what the public hears' which I think makes the point that fairly dull, ordinary-looking words can mean different things in different contexts (but still sufficiently similar to cause more confusion perhaps than if the meanings of the words were vastly different?)

What scientists say and what the public hears. http://t.co/DVpu0ZME8L pic.twitter.com/Ku2bAXEyda
— Austin Frakt (@afrakt) April 28, 2014

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Original post

If you don't know what phosphatidylethanolamine is you might at least reasonably guess that it's a bit of scientific jargon. It flags itself up to you as something to pay attention to because it's not an everyday word - hopefully whatever you're reading that contains it would explain what it means (it's a membrane lipid - it's a component of the double-layer protective flexible shell that covers every single living cell).

But what about words and phrases like 'theory' or 'protein' or 'model' all of which have a certain meaning in a scientific context but another meaning in everyday language ('hunch', 'dietary nutrient', 'small boat/train or clothes-selling person'). These don't particularly flag themselves up as 'words to be aware of'.

They're not jargon, they are everyday words but they're not being used in an everyday sense - what word describes this class of words that have this dual purpose? I thought about 'Janus words' but that term's already in use to describe words like 'sanction', or 'cleave', which mean both one thing and its exact opposite http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/sanction-cleave.aspx

I can't have been the only person to come up against this so am assuming that the universe has already given this class of words and phrases a name - what is it?

Thanks!

Later that same day...
@alex_brovvn has suggested 'false friends', @sciencebase suggested 'dualisms' and @inspiringsci came up with 'sensu stricto' and 'sensu lato'. I think the winner though, also suggested by @inspiringsci, might be 'polyseme'.