That Guy

I know, I haven’t posted anything for this segment lately. Well, the reason is that I’m cancelling it and didn’t have the courage to admit it right off the bat. Why am I abandoning such a wellspring of material? At its heart, That Guy is just so much self-deprecation, which I've come to think is cheap humor and feels suspiciously like wide-net compliment fishing. Maybe once in a while for an easy rise, but that’s it. Moving on.

I’ve invented a new communication device. It consists of making up new words and giving them definitions exactly matching whatever complex concept you’re trying to express. I’ll go first.

You: “Hey Lee, how was seeing so-and-so?”

Me: “Hmmm, I’d say it was mraschful. Yeah, that captures it.”

You: ?

True, the questioner is no more enlightened, but you have a perfect little agate of meaning, and won’t need to break it down into more common, ill-fitting, terminology. As a corollary, people won’t be tempted to interpret what you say based on their personal dictionary of connotative meaning. Everybody wins!

I think this is why I got such a charge out of “litost”. A foreign word is effectively a fake word to a non-speaker. Give the meaning a little direction, and voilà!, a pseudoword with your own, semi-validated definition.