Friday, June 19, 2009

Honour Among Squabbits

Ever since I was a little boy, I’ve enjoyed making up words. One of the first neologisms I ever invented was yuckleburpia. It was an interjection, a sort of ultimate form of “yuck,” as in “Yuckleburpia! Carrots aren’t supposed to be that colour!” It could also be used as a kind of clunky adjective, as in “Those fuzzy blue carrots look really yuckleburpia.” It wasn’t an elegant piece of word-making, but it worked well enough when I was five years old.

Suzi has such a talent for inventing words that I’ve made a Suziisms dictionary, complete with terms like apocaplectic (to be so angry as to bring about the end of all things), monkoidal (monkey-like in appearance), skullular (resembling a skull), onionated (containing onions), succention (an ascending succession), and (of course), weasicular (similar to a weasel, ferret or other small mustalid).

In my career as a massage therapist, I’ve worked at some pretty wacky places. One of the craziest was in the heart of downtown Garland, Texas. The gals there were sweet, funny, and exceptionally silly. One time, apparently, someone’s child saw a chinchilla on the television and asked what it was. One of my colleagues slammed the words “squirrel” and “rabbit” together in her odd brain and told the kiddo “it’s a squabbit.”

It caught on almost instantly. We started calling each other “squabbit” and the word took on the meaning of anyone cute and/or silly. It usually means a kid, but its meaning has expanded over the years to include adults too.

So that’s your vocabulary lesson for today…

Squabbit: (noun) 1. A small child, particularly one who is very cute or mischievous. “Sofia is getting to be a cute little squabbit these days.”
2. Any particularly cute, silly, or mischievous individual. “She is a real squabbit when she feels the mood come on.”

Variant forms: squabb, squabbonia, squabbitissimus, squabberella, squabbitizer

Squabbiticious: (adjective) 1. extremely silly and goofy. “I don’t know what was with Jake, he was in a really squabbiticious mood that weekend!”



I still love my made-up words…squabbit that I sometimes am. So long as I don’t sound too much like a norkasaurus* or say anything cringeworthy**, I’ll probably keep using my panopoly*** of them for the rest of my life!




* really dorky person

** causing one to cringe or recoil in disgust

*** a vast array, from “panoply” and “monopoly”

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