Perfect Bound Press Word Fugitives In Pursuit Of Wanted Words - Them

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o
THEM
W
hy is it that there never seem to be enough words in
the dictionary to cover everyone we dislike? To
make things worse, new kinds of dislikable people
keep cropping up.
Shall we look on the sunny side for a sec? A number of old
reasons to disparage people are passé. Insulting terms for members
of particular ethnicities, gays, blondes, women in general, old peo
-
ple, the disabled, etc., are so early twentieth century. Not only that,
but our society has managed to break cycles of abuse of much
longer standing. Epithets like lackey, churl, and mountebank;
poltroon, pander, and strumpet; coxcomb, popinjay, and varlet are
scarcely ever hurled anymore.
To look on the snarky side, that’s not all to the good—or at
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WORD FUGITIVES
least, the part about the epithets is not. Those ringing words all
belonged to Shakespeare’s vocabulary. Lackeys (“servile followers;
toadies”) and churls (“rude and boorish” or “miserly” people) and
all the rest of those kinds of dislikable people still plague us. We
just hurl different, cruder epithets at them.
Bring back the old, I say! But let’s also bring on the new. Why?
Because today there are more kinds of dingalings in heaven and
earth than were dreamt of in Shakespeare’s philosophy.

“I’d love to have a term for those people who leave long, ram-
bling messages on answering machines and then rattle off

their phone numbers at lightning speed in the last second,
forcing you to repeat the entire message to get the all-
important digits.”
—Marc Burckhardt, Austin, Texas
Of all the people who responded to this request, exactly two dared
to admit that they’d ever left such messages themselves. Steve
Billington, of Vancouver, British Columbia, confessed, “Sadly, I
am among the guilty,” and suggested the coinage “idiodidactiphone:
a foolish information provider on your telephone.” Eric C. Besch,
of Fayetteville, N.C., began his response by explaining himself:
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THEM
“Somehow I am always befuddled not to have a person answer my
call.” Besch suggested the adjective prolixety-split.
Ted Garon, of Mission Viejo, Calif., wrote not to propose a
word but to share his solution to the problem, which, he boasted,
has “failed only once in the past three years.” His answering-
machine message is carefully enunciated and ends like this:
“Please say your phone number slowly. We have an elderly butler.”
David P. Nagle, a college professor in Norman, Okla., had no
sympathy whatsoever for the perpetrators who get in touch with
him: “students whose breathless cell-phone messages fall into cell
hell right after a ‘dog ate my homework’ statement, during the
‘please call me right away at [unintelligible]’ finale.” Nagle’s
coinage was a variant on what was probably the most popular sug
-
gestion: prestodigitators.
And Gregory Pierce, of New York City, wrote: “As an English
tutor, I’ve had to listen to epic phone messages from high school
-

ers who are in the ‘diction is uncool’ phase. After listening to a
long chain of ums and uhs, I usually can’t understand the crucial
digits at the end. I call these people number-mumblers. Since there
have been so many, I’ve recently shortened the term to numblers.”
Neat!
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WORD FUGITIVES

“Is there a word to describe someone who can read but can’t
pronounce words? One such person I know, who learned En
-
glish from books, says things like ‘Follow the gweed at the
cathedral.’ ”
—Jean P. Bell, Ontario, N.Y.
Jake Fey, of Berlin, Germany, wrote: “As an English teacher
abroad, I often run into this phenomenon. These students may
learn to read English, but they definitely do not speak English. In
-
stead, I tell them, they speak Booklish.”
Carol Takyi, of Sherwood Park, Alberta, wrote that her hus-
band, “as a young West African arriving to study in the United
States in the fifties, learned to pronounce many English words
the hard way—for instance, by going to a music store and asking
to look at their hee-fees.” And Patrick McDougall, of Montreal,
Quebec, wants it on record that he had a thirty-seven-year ca
-
reer as a radio announcer despite having pronounced, in his
early days on the job, “misled to rhyme with whistled and infrared
to rhyme with compared.” Surely we’ve all fallen victim at one
time or another—for instance, when faced with Goethe or Hip

-
pocrates, Thucydides or Liberace, chimera or paradigm. But what to
call the condition? More than one person suggested the nifty
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THEM
coinage tome-deaf; he who proposed it first was Don Slutes, of
Phoenix.
P. S .: Did you have any trouble decoding gweed? It’s standing in for
guide, of course.

“I’m sitting in my cubicle wondering why there isn’t a word
for people who send e-mail messages and then follow them
up saying, ‘Did you get my e-mail message?’ It would cer
-
tainly be nice to have a label for them.”
—Tom Okawara, Evanston, Ill.
This is a surprisingly divisive question. “I take issue with the bla-
tant attack on those of us who send follow-up e-mails,” wrote
Andrew Goldberg, of New York City. Cheryl Scott Ryan, of
Austin, Texas, wrote, “Our recent office move has not been kind
to our outgoing e-mail, so I feel a need to make sure all my
e-mails make it to their intended recipients.” Ryan, among many
others, proposed the bias-free term re-mailers to describe people
like her.
Suzanne Lanoue, of Tuscaloosa, Ala., advised, “They may be
doing it for a good reason, such as that it is an important matter to
them and you didn’t answer them in good time.” She continued:
“How about a word for people who never read their e-mail? Or a
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WORD FUGITIVES

word for people who never answer it? And what about for those
self-centered people who reply to your e-mail but don’t answer
any of your questions or don’t make comments about anything
you said?”
Most people, however, heaped scorn on e-mailers who follow
up, suggesting such unflattering terms as cybores (coined by Mar
-
jory Wunsch, of Cambridge, Mass.), confirmaniacs (Sheridan
Manasen, of Kennebunk, Maine), memorons (Phil Ruder, of For
-
est Grove, Ore.), and e-diots (proposed by several people).
Mitchell Burnside Clapp, of Los Olivos, Calif., wrote: “I suggest
NetWit, with the irregular capitalization appropriate to the com
-
puter age. I think a hideous neologism is needed to describe the
hideous reality.”
John G. Keresty, of Vernon, N.J., shared an observation about
a similar behavior in a different realm. He wrote: “Years ago I was
in the sportswriting business, and I found that every coach of any
sport at any level would repeat short instructions or exhortations
thus: ‘Let’s go get ’em, let’s go get ’em’; ‘Good job, Keresty, good
job’; ‘Hey, ref, hey, ref! Are you blind? Are you blind?’ and so on,
and so on. So for the quest for a word for e-mail follow-uppers, I
give you the one I coined for all the double-speak coaches: redun
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dunces.” Very nice. Very nice.
P. S . : To everyone who responded electronically to this question in
The Atlantic and then sent a follow-up e-mail cheekily asking
whether I’d received that response, Yes, I did, thanks!
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IF THESE ARE ANSWERS,
WHAT WAS THE QUESTION?
Here are a few responses to a challenge issued by The
Washington Post’s Style Invitational contest. To come up
with these words, what were readers asked to do?
Diddleman:
a person who adds nothing but time to an effort (Mark Bow-
ers, Alexandria, Va.)
Errorist:
a member of a radical Islamic cult who blows himself up in a
mannequin factory (Barry Blyveis, Columbia, Md.)
The fundead:
corpses who walk around at night with lampshades on
their heads (Jonathan Paul, Garrett Park, Md.)
Nominatrix:
a spike-heeled woman who controls the selection of candi-
dates for party whip (Chris Doyle, Forsyth, Mo.)
Philaunderer:
a man who hops from bed to bed but always washes the
sheets (Malcolm Fleschner, San Mateo, Calif.)
Tskmaster:
an ineffective slave driver (Jonathan Paul, Garrett Park, Md.)
Urinpal:
a guy who uses the one right next to you even though all the oth-
ers are unoccupied (Dominic Casario, Tampa, Fla.)
Whorde:
a group of prostitutes (Bird Waring, New York City)
_________
_________
THE QUESTION WAS...

The Style Invitational challenged readers to “take any
word, add, subtract, or alter a single letter, and redefine
the word.”

If the answers commonly suggested include audiots, cellfish, cellots,
cellulouts, earheads, earitants, incellferables, imbecells, jabberwonks, and
phonies, what is the question? Here goes:
“We all encounter people in cars, airports, and shopping cen-
ters who seem to have a cell phone glued to one of their ears.
I would like to have a word to describe these people.”
—Mike Lewiecki, Albuquerque, N.M.
Usually when Word Fugitives reckons with people whose habits
are unsavory, at least a few respondents rise to the defense of the
people in question. Not this time.
Russ Newsom, of Charlotte, N.C., suggested the word phone-
glommer but, rather than explaining that, told this tale: “I was in-
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