words

[cos]

Sometimes my friends make up words or terms I want to see spread, so I use them in conversation when I can. I like to drop these words into casual conversation without explanation, if I think they make sense in context and people will understand them when they hear them used; lack of explanation conveys the message "this is a real word". But explanations have their place, so this year I posted some of them on Urban Dictionary:

• cosominate - "to sleep together", with no particular implication of sex
  drwex came up with this one, sometime in the late 90s I think. I'd been trying to get the sex out of "sleep together" for years but it just doesn't work, so I think we needed this word.


• extra arm - the one arm there's no good place for, when two people are cuddling in bed
  I think this one's been around for a long time and I don't know the source, so it doesn't really belong in this set, but I was surprised to see there was no definition of it on urbandictionary at all. Maybe it wasn't as widely used as I thought?


• alany - an unfortunate or amusing contradiction or circumstance you may be tempted to call "irony", but it's not irony
  This is my favorite of these words! dr_memory came up with it a good long time ago, mid 90s IIRC, and I've been enthusiastically spreading it ever since then. More recently, I've run into a few people who used it or knew it. Success? Or independent coinage?


• bisexual whiplash - what you get from looking at all the cute people in spring
  Another one from dr_memory.


• libby - to out someone's secret identity.
  yesthattom spontaneously used it in a conversation and then posted the conversation to his LJ; I copied the same conversation into the urbandictionary posting.


• pre-sequitur - doesn't follow what was said/written just before it, but does follow something that came earlier, so it feels like a non-sequitur but it's actually a jump in the conversation's chronology.
  Finally, this one is mine. Jocasta and I used to have conversations full of these, online and off, and since she was always introducing me to fun new words I hadn't met before (such as "pixielated") I wondered if she knew a word for this sort of thing. She didn't, so I made one up.

Enjoy them, use them, and give them some thumbs up on urbandictionary!

Comments

[coraline]

i've been using "cosominate" since before i met you... i think probably a bunch of us have invented it independently.

(i do remember talking to someone who had first encountered the word through you and it took her years to realize that it was "co-sominate" and not "cos-sominate" (i.e. specifically to sleep with cos :)

[cos]

*laugh*

I am quite sure that wex posted it to a mailing list years before I met you, and I would be surprised if there weren't enough social overlap back then that the lists he posted to would reach you. So I'd expect you to have started using the word before we met :)

[coraline]

...no, i'm talking high school :p