The Man, the Myth, the Made Up Words

My husband has this thing he does with words — he makes quite a few of them up. And then he inserts his weird words into dialogue with such casual confidence he’s seldom called out about it. Rather, folks are left quietly questioning their own clearly inadequate vocabularies until able to access a dictionary and realize they’ve been had.

Once, while meeting with a client whose every sentence was riddled with ten-dollar words, Don couldn’t resist dropping the spontaneously created anxiopathical into a sentence. He noticed the client paused when he said it and tilted her head a bit, like a dog hearing a high-pitched sound, but the word fit so well into his sentence she seemed to accept it was right.

Occasionally, when Don is amid a cluster of men and conversation slides into one of those testosterone-heavy subjects involving car parts or gun types or specialty tools, I’ll see my adorable creative director nod knowingly and say something to the tune of, “If you ask me, that’s going to call for a double ought semi-automatic filament with a triple peener.” The reaction of those around him tends to fluctuate greatly, everything from polite nodding to pity to looking at him like he just sprouted a second head.

My favorite, though, is when he goes Full Don on someone, pulling out a long chunk of memorized dialogue from a movie or television show.

For instance, when a friend was touring our warehouse and commented on the surprising quality of our cobbled-together stereo system, Don shrugged nonchalantly and said, “It’s just a simple poly-phonetically grouped 20-square digit key transposed from a booster vadonic form of multiple nulls.”

A line he thinks was originally spoken by Dan Aykroyd in Spies Like Us, released in the mid-80s.

How does he do it? And why?

For a number of years, Don was a mainstage actor at Atlanta’s Whole World Improv Theatre, where he honed the art of quick thinking, although he was already bent that direction back when we were in high school together. It’s one of the things that drew me to him, possibly because my own mind does not work that fast, nor does it store dialogue. The extent of my movie line regurgitation is limited to short bits like, “Make my day” or “Life is like a box of chocolates.”

Still, I do have a few words of my own that might not technically exist, though they should.

For instance, there’s trashstacktomanipulation, which is the art of balancing a seemingly impossible number of items on an already full trash can to avoid being responsible for removing and replacing the bag.

Hamperstackers are those who drape or stack previously worn clothing on the hamper to delay having to decide whether the items can be worn again or need laundered.

Marshmallowectomy is when someone has eaten only the marshmallows out of the entire box of Lucky Charms.

The fear of replacing an empty toilet paper roll with a fresh one is called newrollaphobia and is evidenced by the new roll being placed on top of or in close proximity to the empty.

And the inability to complete a remodeling project, often leaving a single minor detail undone, is called finishphobia. This can result in the afflicted’s spouse developing tapemeasurephobie. Basically, when the finishphobic spouse is seen using a tape measure for the clear purpose of a new project, the tapemeasurephobic will often be compelled to hide credit cards, check books, and car keys.

As I was attempting to wrap up what I was writing, Don walked into the room. I asked if I could read it to him.

“Excellent,” he said. “It was thoroughly phosphogenic, although it could maybe use a bit more ammorizing, right there at the end.”

A number of people, upon meeting Don, have said, “I bet you’re never bored.”

And they would be right.