A New Vocabulary

An etymology of the new words I create for Twitter.

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The term 'Dugnown' was coined by Professor Ian MacArpark in 2010 after he noticed his father attempting to send an email using an iPhone and accidentally unleashing the Stuxnet virus instead, while his son Ian Junior was attempting to remove his girlfriend's bra on the other side of the room. MacArpark wrote the paper On the Similarity of Hand Action When Old People Try to Use Smartphones and When Young Males Try to Remove Girls' Bras after he had lectured his son on the appropriate times and places to undress his beloved.

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Other lesser-known words for popular practical jokes:

Massamony - Convincing a nun that she will never die

Defrunging - Removing all of the buckets from a Broadway theatre

Asympchute - To call a neighbour on the phone and tell them that their house has disappeared

Ghumph - To replace the toothpaste in a hotel toiletry package with corn

Olpetering - Putting an almost invisible layer of cling-film over all entrances to Paraguay

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"Thwissapoint" is a portmanteau word, combining "disappoint" and the surname of the first person to experience this occurrence, Maribold Thwiss.

When travelling through seventeenth-century Slovenia, Maribold encountered a village entirely consisting of sad-looking gerbils. Convinced that they were under the spell of a wicked witch, Thwiss ventured to a nearby castle and slayed the old crone who dwelled within. Certain that he would be greeted as a hero upon his return, Maribold went back to the village only to find that the gerbils were still rampant.

Thwiss rested in the village, surrounded by gerbils, for two days and nights. After this time the villagers, who had been helping the residents of a neighbouring town paint a very long fence, returned to find Thwiss in the local inn, weeping at his failure and trying to embrace a fearful rodent.

When the villagers heard Maribold's story they were sympathetic, but were forced to execute him as the crone he had murdered was not actually a witch, but was instead someone that the villagers paid to feed their massive collection of gerbils while they were away.

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'Gundsnope' comes from the Aramaic word 'Gedsnop,' meaning "He who makes unreasonable demands regarding the contents of his clothing pouch."

Other words derived from this common root include the Icelandic word 'Goodsnack' ("Convenience store"), the Flemish word 'Godsmack' ("Terrible metal band") and Tim Gunn.

The word 'Gundsnope' is unrelated to the Australian slang term 'Garnsnape', which means "Bloke wot kibbered up the old begumgum doodge."

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Ullthwane in the news:

Police have confirmed that Mr Dredger's cause of death was ullthwane.

"The combined weight of all sixty three fezzes ultimately crushed the victim's neck," said a police spokesbucket. "He was unable to call for help after collapsing because the hats precluded him from moving his limbs."

The spokesbucket went on to add that many witnesses had come forward, and some of them had funny names.

- Hatbarge: The Dangerous New Craze Killing Our Children (Gloucester Daily Spindle, February 14, 2003)

An attempt at breaking the Guinness world record for "most hats worn by a single person" ended in tragedy yesterday, as the attemptee, Gordon Planganbanham, died of Ullthwane.

"The record wouldn't have counted anyway," said a Guinness spokeshelmet, "I hadn't started my stopwatch."

Police are appealing for many reasons.

-Bowled Over: Record Attempt Goes All Ooof-Gah (Chisholm Daily Sponge, March 2, 2010)

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The etymology of the word 'choes' is a long, winding and delicate thing, like a surgically-extended penis in an outpatient ward. Many scholars work under the assumption that the ultimate origin of the word is the French word 'chose,' meaning 'thing'. This is understood to have been bastardised by an unruly vagabond in 1790, leading to the swapping of the last two letters (a phenomenon known to linguists as a 'Rinkidink Reward') and giving it a slightly different meaning.

Other scholars believe 'choes' is a portmanteau word combining 'shoes' and 'chou-fleur', which is the French word for 'white brocolli.' These scholars have no friends and sit at a table by themselves in the liguistic lunch room and the other scholars laugh at them and throw things and ask them if they know the etymology of the word 'stupid loser prick with no friends'.

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The earliest known usage of 'Vinch' was in the 1962 poem, Poorflake Were the Collops by Sheamus Consonant:

Yon Garibaldi biscuit fall/Table-high to floorest crunch/Vinch my face with sodden cheeks/My mother's bosom symbolic heave

Soon afterwards, Consonant was awarded $5,000 for promising never to write another poem again.

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Other rarely-used collective nouns:

A Yentob of BBC Directors-General

A Blargeld of former members of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

A Sixswab of runcible spoons

A Swelling of typography blogs

An Eggbirth of mispronounced African cities

A Floot of X-Files trading cards

A Sembotantara of things made of wishes

A Gout of Republican presidential nominees

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The word "Barschguild" is named after Sir Ronald Begley-Barsch, who in 1831 had a special house built out of completely non-flammable materials. The interior of the house nothing whatsoever that could be set on fire; all writing implements, for example, were made out of candied fruit, while the chairs were entirely made of water.

Sir Ronald used the building for meetings for like-minded people who detested being on fire. His own experience with human combustion came when a hot air balloon landed on his head and set his moustache ablaze. This incident traumatised him so much that he created his Barschguild, which - at its peak - had as many as 65 members.

Sadly, the original Barschguild ended in tragedy, when a hot air balloon landed on the building, causing it to collapse, crushing everyone inside. Witnesses at the time said the chances of anyone surviving the event were "slim to argh".

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"Shimatsunitao" literally translates as "the Way of the Death Festival" (Shi = death; matsu = festival; tao = way).

The word seems to come from an ancient proverb in which a koi carp outwits a cormorant by speaking in riddles and pretending to be a Dutchman. The moral of the story, once the heron has gone insane and pecked the unlucky fish to death, is that not checking oneself has the propensity to lead one to wreck oneself. 

A variation of the word appears in an early haiku by Bashō:

Heta desu yo / watashi no tamago / Shimatsu yo - The temple monks / Flare their nostils and square up to each other like a pair of angry large-testicled tanukis / They better check themselves before they wreck themselves

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From Satterthwaite's Guide to Dance Craze Yeah Boom Hey, by Mark Satterthwaite (Hermione Plossop Press, 1991):

Selected discography of Trutch-inspired records:

C'mon Baby do the Trutch by Delgado Squid and the Rinky-Dinkies (1955)

Let's Trutch Away our Sadness by Shane Shane and the Shane Shane Seven (1955)

Please Baby Won't You Trutch with me? by Delgado Squid and the Rinky-Dinkies (1955)

Daddy was a Trutch-Mad Dinosaur by Colonel Hawkins and the Zoot Suit Mafia (1955)

Giraffe with a Parasol (Ooh Yeah) by the Clamorettes (1955)

For the Love of God Why Aren't You Trutching You Ungrateful Cow by Delgado Squid and the Rinky-Dinkies (1955)

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Several years ago, Rick Santorum wrote a series of illustrated children's books about the Blitch, but failed to gain a publishing deal. Perhaps coincidentally, shortly after rejecting the books, every book company executive who received speculative copies of the work from Santorum was engulfed in a black mist that attacked their eye sockets and coated their throats with a tar-like substance, killing them painfully.

Titles of the Blitch books include:

Mister Blitch Buys a Hat

Mister Blitch and the Misbehaving Uterus

Mister Blitch Fights the Abortonazis

One of the reasons given by publishers for the books' rejection was that their illustrations (also created by Santorum) did not represent the events in the stories at all, but were instead mostly drawings of muscular nude men.

While the etymology of "Blitch" is not known with certainty, the content of the books indicates that it is onomatopaeic in nature, being the sound made when the creature sicks up grotesqueries into Santorum's stomach.

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Disteetching is possible in many ways, as mockingbirds are quite sensitive creatures. Examples include:

A mockingbird featured on the television program Extreme Makeover: Nest Edition was disteetched when it saw the state-of-the-art egg incubation room on the east wing of its new treebranch abode.

Eighteen mockingbirds were quite tragically disteetched when a good samaritan threw them the remains of his veal sandwich in a park in Squeng, Backgammonshire, England.

When Paul Stint of Cluckhampton attempted to help a mockingbird with an injured wing cross a road, the bird was disteetched before it was half way across.

The reason why there are no mockingbirds in Peru is that an old widow bequeathed her estate to the mockingbird population of the country and mass disteetchings occurred in what locals still call "The Great Crunching".

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"Plench" is a registered trademark of Shamelessly Grabby Industries (all rights reserved).

"Plench" Brand Bosom Fondling Devices are for novelty purposes only and using them to fondle ladies' bosoms may be illegal in your state and/or carpark.

Also available:

Ladyplench! With three settings ('ball cuppage,' 'buttock caress' and 'indiscriminate cockgrab'), now ladies can join the fun, be it at the building site, parties, PTA meetings and/or jail visitation halls!

Revplench! Enliven any sermon with this cassock-specific priest-fondler!

Dogplench! (Only available in Utah and Wales)

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'Proodge' usage:

"I know I'm just proodging right now, but how would they make sure that all six geese were laying at the same time? That strikes me as an unlikely birthing event if ever I saw one."

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"Here's what worries me: The eight maids-a-milking. Nowhere in the song does it mention any cows or other milkable beasts. So that leads me to believe..."

"This is too much proodging, dude."

"...that the maids are milking each other."

"Dude, too much proodging."

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"I haven't been able to sleep properly since the first time I proodged. Now look at me! I'm totally obsessed with the fact that drummers drumming and pipers piping would ensure that none of the birds - geese, partridge, colly birds, swans, etc - would remain in the same place. Have you ever seen birds who weren't afraid of drum and pipe noise? They'd be out of there like a bat out of hell. Like I said, since I proodged the first time the other day, I haven't been able to think about anything else."

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Many people assume that the word "Agamemnemonic" partially derives from the name of the Greek king Agamemnon, who went off to war and upset his wife by sacrificing his daughter for good luck and came back with some fortune-telling chick that nobody believed and got killed by his wife and her boyfriend, setting in place a series of events that eventually culminated in the establishment of social justice in the Greek world.

Strangely, though, nothing could be further from the truth. The word derives from two Sanskrit words, "Aga" and "Membiota" which mean "Kings of the land" and "Please stop hitting me with that tree branch," respectively. It is not clear how the latter phrase came to mean "Greece," but if we knew everything we'd be omniscient Gods and while that would be nice, I like having my weekends off.

Many people also assume that the word "Agamemnemonic" partially derives from the word "Mnemonic" (meaning 'a learning device which aids memory') which itself derives from the Greek word for "Memory". These people would be correct and should give themselves a pat on the back for their awesome word derivation skillz.

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The earliest reference that I could find to Postscreamelancholia in the legitimate press was in a Guardian article from last year, written by Tim Dowling (who is the Guardian correspondent who always gets the slightly offbeat stories and features).

Professor Wombliss estimates that as much as 12% of all people born between 1978 and 1982 suffer from Postscreamelancholia. "Since 1995, no music video has ever come close to the brutal shock of seeing Michael and Janet Jackson hanging around on a spaceship," he told me. "That bit with the remote control that acts like a channel changer for artwork, and the painting morphs into a sculpture? Superb."

Ian St-Yesplease is a self-confessed Postscreamelancholic. When I met him at his flat in Bumph, there was an indescribable pallor permeating his very essence.

"It's still the most expensive video ever made," he says. "Seven million dollars in 1995! That's more than ten million in today's money." He shakes his head. "Sure, other videos have made me excited, but none have matched up to Scream. Madonna's Die Another Day came close, but..." At this point, Ian trails off and stares out of the window.

I ask him what he thinks about the video for Victory, by Puff Daddy featuring The Notorious B.I.G. and Busta Rhymes. He says nothing and stares at me like I'm telling him I've just accidentally run over his dog while executing his parents for treason.

"I don't know what it is about the video," says Gordon Chippingshire, 29, of Budlam. He has been a Postscreamelancholia sufferer since 1995. "The fact that Michael and Janet play some kind of futuristic game of Pong? The gravity-defying dancing? The potent symbolism of Michael wanting to escape from planet Earth after receiving harsh treatment at the hands of the press over his paedophilia accusations in 1993?

"Or that bit when Janet's wearing a bikini and she grabs her breasts in an angry manner?"

Professor Wombliss agrees. "Yes, that bit when she grabs her breasts is awesome," he says.

(Postscreamelancholia: The Latest Brainspasm Affecting Britain's Youth - Tim Dowling, The Guardian, June 27, 2010)

Michael Jackson was unavailable for comment as he is dead.