Cos (cos) wrote,
Cos
cos

words

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!
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