Ewaldapedia

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fauxppointment (n.) - an appointment for which the designated time does not actually matter.

A relatively recent coinage, fauxppointment dates back to a Wednesday in mid-September 2010. On that day a much older and wiser Sandy Dunlap placed a call to a local mechanic. The mechanic answered, and a time was arranged for Sandy to bring in his vehicle for inspection and possible repair.

“What time’s good for you?” Sandy asked.

“Anytime’s good for me,” the mechanic said. “Your call.”

“How about…two-fifteen?”

“That’s fine.”

“Oh, you know what…we better make it two.”

“That’s fine too.”

Sandy paused, as he realized then that perhaps the time did not in fact matter. And yet the mechanic’s website said appointments were mandatory. Sandy’s realization was validated when he showed up at the mechanic’s just before two only to find that another customer had been taken just before him, and he would have to wait another thirty minutes for inspection to begin on his car.

“What a frickin’ fauxppointment,” Sandy muttered under his breath as he picked up a copy of Harper’s Bazaar and started flipping. 

Since that fateful day, fauxppointment has been overheard in conversations centering on everything from dinner reservations to manis and pedis. This word knows nothing of discrimination. 

in use: “You know today’s meeting?”

“The one at five?”

“No, it’s at four-thirty.”

“Four-thirty?”

“We agreed. It was at four-thirty.”

….

“Anyway, I thought we could move it up to four, just to get out a little early. What do you say?”

“It could be at 4. It might have to be at 4:30 by the time I get there. Better be safe and move it to 5:07.”

“5:07?”

“5:10. Just to be safe.”

“Um….”

“It’s a fauxppointment. A firm fauxppointment. Don’t argue. I’m pulling rank.”

from Ewaldapedia, the other free encyclopedia

cattriloquist (n.) - one who talks with a feline, supplying both sides of the conversation. Cattriloquism does not have to be on public display; oftentimes it occurs in private.

It is unknown when exactly cattriloquism began, but experts in the field strongly believe that ancient Egyptians were the first cattriloquists.

The first recorded case of cattriloquism dates back to the summer of 1987 when Mrs. Honey Scranton came home to find her husband in conversation with someone she couldn’t yet see. Her husband, Paul, was seated at the dining table with his back to her. Someone must have been just beyond, seated at the opposite head of the table, blocked from Mrs. Scranton’s view. At first she thought it might be one of their children—but not only were all the little ones away at camp, her husband was actually talking back to himself in a slightly different voice, a voice, Mrs. Scranton was frightened to admit later, which sounded stupid. It was a dumb voice, and had her husband taken in a waif off the street? He had not, for when Mrs. Scranton, at last fed up with standing in the entryway watching the back of her husband’s head, entered the dining room and walked around the table, she saw seated opposite her husband the family cat, Puffball. Puffball, a white Persian, had his paws on the edge of the table, and when Mrs. Scranton approached the animal did not once turn to look at her. Puffball’s attention was entirely on Paul, who continued to talk without noticing his wife. 

“Oh really?” Mr. Scranton was saying. “You don’t like it here at all?”

“No, I don’t. Not one bit,” Mr. Scranton then said in the stupid-voice.

“But, Puffer,” he then said in his regular, human voice, “look around you. Look at all the luxuries you have. Think of all the other cats in the world who don’t have it half as good as you do.”

“You think I care about other cats? I’m all id, human.”

“Puffer, I have a name. It’s Paul.”

“I can’t understand you…”

“You can too understand me. You’re just choosing not to understand me when it suits you.”

Finally Mrs. Scranton, who had been standing to the side of the table staring down at the two, stepped in.

“Paul, what are you doing?”

Her husband looked up. He didn’t seem embarrassed at all. Quite calmly he said, “I’m trying to reason with Puffball here. He wanted to air his grievances to me.”

Mrs. Scranton looked at the cat, which was now on the floor licking itself.

“Paul, honey…”

“Yes, Honey?”

“I think we need to talk about getting you out of the house more.”

in use: “I finally found out Meowzer doesn’t like that new scented litter.”

“He started sneezing, huh?”

“No. He talked with Sally. He was able to explain everything to her, and she understood everything he said. She’s really becoming quite the cattriloquist.”

from Ewaldapedia, the other free encyclopedia

emaciapate (v.) - to liberate through starvation (most always self-imposed).

The origins of this word date back to the spring of 1998 when the political dissident and prisoner Moomira, in his second month of a hunger strike that had reduced his weight from a healthy 170 pounds to an unsettling 70 pounds, was brought before the grand tribunal of his home country, which will here go unnamed.

Those on the tribunal smiled and looked smug. “What is this to us?” one of them was reported as having said. “You are doing us a favor. You are saving us the bullets.”

“The rope,” said another.

“The blade,” added yet another.

“The chemicals.”

“The electricity.”

“The stones.”

“The truck tires.”

“Truck tires?”

“Yes, truck tires. You did not hear? It’s a new decree.”

“Irregardless,” the original tribunal speaker misspoke, “your self-imposed starvation is not aiding you in any way.”

After a heavy-handed moment, Moomira asked for permission to speak. Permission having been granted, the very tall and now very skeletal man, looking something like  a pair of super-tall stilts without the walker, struggled to stand. He was aided by his guards who, truth be told, had taken a liking to him since midway through his imprisonment. The chains around Moomira’s wrists, arms, body weighed more than he, but when he spoke it was in the voice of a distinguished statesman.

“I must say,” he said, “that you are wrong. My self-starvation is indeed working, for even now pictures of me in this state, the physical state you have forced me into, are circulating through the Internet.”

“The Internet?” one tribunal member said. “That’s impossible. We have no Internet in this country!”

“Ah,” said Moomira, wise to the future, “it does not matter that it is not in our country. The rest of the world has it. That is what matters. That is what you will not be able to stop.”

In the ensuing commotion among the tribunal members various talk was bandied about; among the sentences were “Who took the photos? We’ll have his head!” and “We should not have let him linger like this!” Through it all Moomira remained calm, and when the ruckus had at last died down he revealed to the tribunal that movements had already sprung up throughout the United States, Europe, and “everywhere democracy, if not necessarily decency, prevails.” Signs across college campuses urged people to both FREE MOOMIRA and FEED MOOMIRA. There was talk of the U.S. President authorizing the deployment of Special Ops forces to rescue the political prisoner.

The mention of U.S. Special Ops, the dreaded ‘Seal Team Six’, was ultimately too much for the tribunal members to hear. It took them another week, but finally they freed and fed Moomira on state-run television, for all to see.

“People of the free world,” Moomira gasped from on board the plane that was bound for the United States, where he would be granted political asylum, “at 65 pounds, I am not just emaciated. Having thrown off my constraints and been restored my rights as a human being, I am not just emancipated. I am both. I am emaciapated!”

in use (albeit a different form): “And now class, if you would all turn to the chapter in your history books on the Emaciapation Proclamation of the Moomirarastrerians….To begin, this is the largest known example of….”

from Ewaldapedia, the other free encyclopedia

A self-genuflective essay is an essay in which the writer is obviously and oftentimes blatantly self-absorbed, narcissistic, solipsistic. It is not always religious in nature. The term is purported to have been coined by one Peabody Winkler, no relation to Henry, who on the morning of Thursday, January 9, 1997 was accosted by one of his previous semester composition students.

The student, Irving Spalding, all of nineteen and looking very much like a future hall of fame quarterback, strode in to the adjunct office where Mr. Winkler was holed up and said, “You ruined my break.”

“Spalding,” Winkler said, for he called all his students by their last names, “what a surprise to see you here. All semester I said come and see me and now you have—a month after grades were due.”

The young Mr. Spalding proceeded to decry the ‘D’ he’d been given in Composition I. Mr. Spalding did not understand why his final portfolio had been scored so low; he had, after all, done everything required.

“It was really,” Winkler explained, “the self-reflective essay that held back the portfolio from passing.”

“But I followed the instructions!” Spalding blurted.

“Yes, but you also included quite a bit of material that was not germane to the class or the semester or this institution of higher learning. The classic car you collected and are now fixing up. The miles you run each day, even in the snow. The cereal you eat. The size of your biceps. How much you can bench press. So on, so on….It’s true you wrote about writing and the class and your work over the semester, but I’d say the required bits, though there, comprised a mere ten percent of the nine pages. And so….”

Spalding raised his hands and sputtered in self-defense. “I don’t know how you can fail me for being honest,” he said. “You asked us to write a self-reflective essay. That’s what I did. I reflected on myself.”

“No,” Winkler said. “You genuflected on yourself.”

“What?”

“You know how in some religions,” said Winkler, “people get down on one knee as an act of obeisance….”

“An act of what?”

“They essentially bow to someone else to show respect for that person, or thing, or idea. Their allegiance. In your writing it’s like you’re bowing to yourself.”

“And that’s wrong?” was the student’s honest answer.

“You wrote a self-genuflective essay, Spalding, not a self-reflective one.”

Winkler then concluded the conversation by curtly referring his former student to the department chair should Spalding wish to file a formal grade challenge.

in use: “Do you know how many self-genuflective essays I see from these first-years at Saint Marguerite de Navarre? Unbelievable! Maybe hell does exist after all.”

from Ewaldapedia, the other free encyclopedia

easedropping is an action noun commonly classified as “childhood mangling of adult English”. The origins of this word date back to the spring of 1991, when four-year-old Ivan Workwax was placed on the toilet and told that if he could go potty like a grownup, he would get the unopened Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle action figure that had been placed on the shelf above him.

“I promise I won’t eavesdrop on you,” Ivan’s mother said before leaving him. The door shut and Ivan was alone. The entire time he stared at the door, never once looking at his intended prize. When, after many minutes had passed, the door opened and Ivan’s mom entered, Ivan still had not accomplished his task.

“I thought you said you had to go.”

“I can’t go now,” Ivan said. “Not when you talked about easedropping on me.”

“But I wasn’t even close to the door.”

“Yeah, but I just thought of you in here easedropping on me.”

“Ivan. What do you mean ‘in here’?”

“Isn’t that what easedropping is?”

“Did you say easedropping?”

“Yeah. Easedropping.”

“What is easedropping, Ivan?”

“Isn’t it when you…stand over me and go potty? Easedrop?”

Flies could have collected in Mrs. Workwax’s mouth then. She left the bathroom to call her husband, who told her to up the medication.

Whatever young Ivan had not created that day, he could be proud knowing he had created something lasting.

in use: “Would you mind leaving the bathroom now? Didn’t your mother ever tell you it’s not polite to easedrop on people?”