Wednesday, June 9, 2010

Sniglets

In the 1980's, there was a book called Sniglets: Words that Should Be in the Dictionary, but Aren't. They were made-up words, like "vacation elbow," for Dad's ability to contort his body and stretch his arm to reach you in the back seat when you are fighting on a long drive. Lately, I've been thinking of words I could change or add one letter to create a Sniglet. So far I've come up with:

hospitility: how you treat visiting relatives you don't want to stay too long

due dulligence: board deliberations before an ill-conceived, bubble-fueled merger

chief sexecutive: a president, governor, mayor, or CEO caught in a public sex scandal

idiet: a fad or crash diet with no sound nutritional underpinning; also, someone on such a diet

incestment management: when the people running the US Treasury Dept are all former Goldman Sachs employees

mosquitoe: that itch your foot gets right after you've laced up your hiking boots

sin-laws: the parents of a live-in boyfriend or girlfriend

Lust: a pointless TV show about a bunch of attractive people who crash on a remote island already populated with other attractive people (oops, that's not a new definition)

iPaid: the newest, must-have pricey gadget from Apple

litigatar: the lawyers who will get rich over the next 20 years fighting over tar balls washing up on Gulf Coast beaches

What Sniglets can you create by tweaking an existing word?

2 comments:

WendyandGabe said...

Those are good ones. I loved that book!

Eric Indiana said...

Here is my most recent list of Words That Should Be:

http://daisybrain.wordpress.com/2010/06/27/words-that-should-be/