Random Thoughts on… Love Nuggets, et al.

If you’ve read this blog before, you know that I’m not a fan of egregious errors in grammar, punctuation, or the like. However, I must admit to one weakness, and one weakness only: I love coining new phrases/words and trying to incorporate them into everyday conversation.

It first started with shortening words. Abbreviations like gonna, wanna, and kinda led the march into my everday lexicon. Longer words were justifiably cut down to more manageable parts–like referring to Democrats as “Dems,” or tuberculosis as “TB”. But it didn’t stop there. There were thousands of well-endowed, multi-syllabic words that seemed just too clunky to use. So, non-traditional abbreviations like “obvi” snuck into my daily conversations. Past abbreviations (whatevs) were shortened even further (tevs). And even though I may have sacrificed some understanding, I made up for it in coolness… obvi.

Technological progress aided this trend. As AIM went, so did traditional conversations. We started to hear people say “LOL” instead of “that’s hilarious.” “WTF” crept out of its older brother’s crude, radio-censored shadow. And as we discovered that we liked the sound of dwarved words, we decided to go one step further and mash them together. Two-for-one derivatives like bootylicious, chillaxing, disturbia, and bridezilla created appropriate new labels to describe feelings and situations.

But there are still some phenomena that cannot be described in a quick, compact manner. Before “bootylicious”, we would have said, “her posterior is quite delicious”, which is too wordy for our liking today. The following, then, is an attempt to encapsulate complicated emotions/events in a single word or phrase. And while the hope is that some of these words and phrases will stay with us forever, for every hit (bootylicious) there will be a bomb (that’s so “fetch”). Tevs. I’ll give it my best shot.

LOVE NUGGETS: What do you think of when you hear the word nugget? You may think of chicken, or gold, or Denver, but I would implore you to think of something else: love. But wait, not real, true, I’m-gonna-marry-you love. This is the kind of love that’s not necessarily whole, but instead, bite-size. I suggest using it in the following way: “I know that we’ve only been dating for two months, but I feel a great connection with you. Love nuggets, Mandy.”

SEPULVEDA: This is the name of a street in Los Angeles, but to me, it sounds like an obscure disease. So, if you have a strange bump on your arm, it’s a sepulveda. If you feel a weird tingling sensation in your leg, you probably caught the sepulveda. Mysterious cuts, rashes, and bruises? All sepulveda. So, if your doctor diagnoses your unknown affliction as a sepulveda… I’ll pray for you.

BOOP: You know the feeling between a blah and an oops? Like: you’re kind of bored at work (blah), but you actually have quite a lot of work to do (oops)? You may feel guilty about being bored and unproductive all the time, but… oh well. Boop.

I’M MARVIN (newly updated, 3/13/09): With a recession, tight wallets, and a skinny President, it has almost become inappropriate to say that you’re “starving”… even if you are really, really hungry. So, if you’re fighting the urge to take a bite out of your own arm, just take the politically-correct route… and say you’re Marvin.

THAT’S SO MADOFF (newly updated, 3/13/09): Unlike the popular Disney TV show That’s So Raven, the “That’s So Madoff” adult version showcases greed, corruption, and the dismantling of the American economy. So whenever you come across liars, cheats, and billion-dollar Ponzi schemes, please let them know that they’re just being unoriginal. Shake your head, sigh, and give them the hand: “Uh uh, girl… don’t commit securities fraud. That’s so Madoff.”