The Glossiary

• Antipiphany: (n) A precipitous flood of ignorance; a sudden surge of quasi-religious confusion resulting in a permanent feeling of understanding less than one ever has before.
• Dopplergänger: (n) Someone who looks hauntingly familiar at a distance, only to fade into a complete stranger on closer approach.
• Echonomics: (n) A method of determining fiscal policy in which collective ignorance is mitigated by simply having each person agree with the expert sitting nearest them.
• Erganemic: (adj) Insufficiently user-friendly; designed deliberately to frustrate homonids. Ex: gas stoves with the controls behind the burners.
• Indigenuous: (adj) Tending to falsely claim membership in an aboriginal or indigenous ethnic group.
• Monodigm: (n) A set of arbitrary exceptions to one or more rules or patterns. (monodigmatic, adj)
• Oughttamatic: (adj) Programmable in principle, but considered so trivial in practice as to be often performed manually -- thus guaranteeing occasional errors. Ex: "Yeah, it's the third time I've created a new passwd entry using cut-and-paste and forgotten to increment the UID; I really oughttamate this."

Thanks to Jim Blandy for these next four:

• Compedible: (adj) Said of ingredients which may be successfully combined in a meal.
• Meandarin: (n) Language spoken by migrant farm workers in China.
• Miscellanium: (n) 1. An indivisible quantum of miscellany. 2. The fundamental element of which all miscellanea are composed.
• Volunteary: (adj) By choice, albiet with weeping reluctance.

And from Susan Hill, in whose used-bookstore I once worked:

• Vendition: (n) The innate characteristic of saleability. Ex: The three factors when considering a book for resale: condition, edition, vendition.

This one discovered by Brian Fitzpatrick:

• Sarchasm: (n) The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the recipient who doesn't get it.

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