I stopped keeping up with the latest slang. I’ve reached that point in life where the proportion of slang in my speech is inverse to the quotient of hipness that I am attaining. “Fo-shizzle, that French guy is hella filthy. We’re tight.” Yeah, as far as I’m concerned, everything’s cool, and everything will remain cool as long as I live.
But I don’t want my spoken vocabulary to stagnate. What if I made up my own slang, using words from science and technology? Then, no one could accuse me of sounding like a poseur…
* That dress makes her look so polyandrous (Polyandry: The practice of a female having more than one mate at a time, like the queen bee and her acrobatic orgy with her dozen or so doomed male drones. In other words, the lady is a tramp.)
* It’s like you’re qubitting my mind! (Qubit: Short for “quantum bit,” which is the means of digitally recording data about atomical particles using quantum computers. An extremely geeky but more accurate way of saying “reading my mind.”)
* He went totally PyroDice. (PyroDice: The username of a Navy man who drove from Virginia to Texas in order to burn down the trailer of a man who called him a “nerd” on an Internet chat site. When someone goes PyroDice, they are embarking on a sustained bout of rage that ends in a fiery inferno).
* Great Bustard! (Great Bustard: The world’s heaviest flying bird who recently laid eggs in Britain for the first time in 175 years after being re-introduced after extinction. The scientists who are working to re-introduce the Great Bustard to Britain are understandably elated. Great Bustard! essentially means Praise God!)
* Wait an attosecond! (Attosecond: A unit of time that has never been observed by humans. The shortest time interval ever observed was 100 attoseconds, which is 100 quintillionths of a second. 100 attoseconds is to one second as one second is to 300 million years. Therefore, when I ask you to “wait an attosecond,” I’m essentially telling you to go to hell.)
