Grammar: Neologisms 23

Never mind lost archaisms and little-known dialect: I like the neologisms people come up with spontaneously every week.

Do all modern architects go to 'whaling shed' school? (NJ, pictured)
The marionettes are weary and starting to snip their strings. (Eliza Mondegreen)

They have the same lies that they repeat as if on shuffle. (@scepticalPhil)
Absolutely nothing has changed in Ireland except the curtains. (@faintlyfalling)

Some bearers of bad news insert footholds and guardrails. (Eliza Mondegreen) 

I am not your addle-pated great-aunt from East Nowhere! (Jessica Fletcher)
Global Britain has become Globule Britain. (@PercyBlakeney63)

What's "neo-intellectual", and what exactly is wrong with it? (@DaRealWulfshady)
People with a PhD in meaningless word salad and histrionics. (@thotcrimimale)

There’s a faint downwelling light. (Monkey Cage on the deep ocean.)
The press looked down on pop and up at rock. Mike Batt

Crime Horror Sci-fi. Nearly all the food groups. (Zoë @Z303)
Looking for an ego gap in a crowded online marketplace. (Jo Bartosch)

Onwards and upwards, or even sideways. (James Braxton)
Edward Leigh MP, whose political ideas were formed in the late Pleistocene... (Brynley Heaven)

In such a short time the city went from iconic London to Bladerunner. (Clinton Harris)
Without a shimmer of a shadow of doubt. (Judge Charles Falconer) 

Actor Alfred Burke’s early career consisted of playing “third bandit from the right”. (TV Times)
Flat-earth nonsense from people whose heads seem to button up at the back. (@JamesUnfettered)

I think the bulb's gone in the Enlightenment. (@mcdonnelljp)
I’m not sure why you think sub-par jokes get your porous point across better. (Via Twitter)
Without wishing to come across as Joan of Snark... (Guardian)

The gumbo of influences that shaped the Crescent City. (Aerial America)
The Ministry of Fuel and Power, known to all as the Ministry of Fools in Power. (LW)

He’s so dense that light bends round him. (Malcolm Tucker, The Thick of It)

It is hard to identify ground zero for berberine as a supposed weight-control substance, but a reasonable guess is that someone seeing the Ozempic bandwagon accelerate as it rolled by had the idea of scavenging through the scientific literature to find some substance that could be passed off as a bargain-basement relative. That bit of fool’s gold was likely found in a review paper published in... (Quackwatch. Nothing new, just a brilliant use of metaphors.)

It's flat, nasal, horrible and unmelodic, and if that's what the kids like nowadays they have ears made from jute. (@fliceverett)

This is farewell. This is the dot at the end of the sentence. (Siegfried and Roy’s manager, Bernie Yumans, when the duo retired)

The feminism is very much, ‘I just learned about feminism on Tuesday’, but I still loved the film. (Wendy Lee on Barbie)

A nice design. On the other tentacle, I've always admired those old UFOs designed by the aliens to look like 1950s lamp-shades. (Michael Frederick Green)

When you miss the exit for pseudoscience and are well on your way to conspiracy land. (@jonathanstea)

Deploying hifalutin and wildly dishonest language to cover for ideas that wouldn't pass Argumentation and Persuasion 101. (@elizamondegreen)

I’m not telling anyone how to live their life here, but if I failed this badly at writing a sentence then I’d probably give up words altogether and start communicating exclusively via handbells and eyebrow movements. (@TakeThatDarwin)

The creationist-to-actual-Nazi pipeline is about half a foot long and has both a moving walkway and helpful signage posted every two inches. (@TakeThatDarwin)

I have enough trouble with Latin without you adding even more noodles to the soup, young man! (@JaneJago1)

The state school I went to was very left wing and didn't like competition of any kind, or the idea of teaching children beyond the three things you can do with mud today.

I may have tipped too pretentious on this one and fallen off the Cliff of Insufferability. (@ingelramdecoucy)

Starting to notice lots of situations where humans hallucinate answers instead of just admitting that they don’t know. (@kareem_carr)

I’ve seen a lot of fusion breakthrough claims in my day. It's a long way to Tipperary yet, folks. (@jordanbpeterson)

I’m sick of this skip-to-the-end thinking. That if you disagree with one thing you agree with something else. (Doozer McDooze)

I'm only about a quarter of the way through my list of things to be cross about today. And I started early. (@latsot)
Mostly these days one just has to speed-fume. (@OpheliaBenson)

If I’m eating fried rice with onions in it I will go full needle in a haystack on that bitch and pick every single one of them out. (@mxcxsxn227)

Old-school left-wingers who cared about stuff like poor people are now relegated to the bargain rail at the back of the shop. (@Matt_H_UK)

Britain’s Next PM, the Channel 4 debate: That the UK is bound for hell in a hand-assisted vehicle, there is little doubt. All that remains is to discover which of these escapees from Pandora’s box will taxi us there; a more wretched collection of dissemblers, idiots, narcissists and people who have mistakenly taken drugs is difficult to imagine under one studio roof, but here we are. An asbestos-clad Krishnan Guru-Murthy meets the contenders before an audience drawn from across this broken isle. God actually help us. (AJC, Guardian June 2019 Ali Caterall admitted on Twitter he never expected the paragraph to go in exactly as written.)

My removal is the greatest stitch-up since the Bayeux Tapestry. (Boris Johnson)

I am not unfamiliar with the "French intellectual." To the extent that I wonder if they grow them in vats. (Allan Brewster)

Liz waters everything except the grass every day with carefully saved washing-up water. Anything that dies despite such cosseting has failed the audition and will not be in the show next year. (Roger Bridgman)

Watching Dune. It's very pretty but I have never encountered anything that takes itself quite this seriously and I've met North Korean officials. (@DmitryOpines)

There’s a kind of perverted shop-window country-house Catholicism a la Evelyn Waugh which makes more of the performance while funking the challenge posed by Christian ethics. (Jonathan Keates)

I could spot a Nazi at a hundred yards in a snowstorm, even if he was dressed in white and hiding behind a hill. (Iain Maclean, TJ's War)

Studying the Lithuanian language is like taking a walk in the Lithuanian forest. It all starts out 'Ooh look at that lovely Indo-European root!'; but before long you've been poisoned by toxic mushrooms, gored by an elk and driven mad by forest gods. (@DrFrancisYoung)

I'm not sure how you affirm an individual's "critical thinking" when they believe any old junk they find down the back of the internet that affirms their prejudices. (Heather Ann Williams)

[Anti-vaxxers] should be careful to not bump their heads on the stalactites when they return to their natural homes. (@BobKerns)

There are few things in life [more disappointing] than going to someone's house, being offered a cup of tea, saying "Oh, yes, thank you", and then being handed a cup of warm aftershave with milk in it. And having to drink it, out of politeness. (Gareth Hughes on Earl Grey Tea)

Some will feel superior for "getting it" and others will slam the book shut with a cluster of cartoon question marks above their heads. (Amazon commenter on John Hawkes’ The Lime Twig. Sounds unreadable – I mean “hallucinatory and pointillistic”.)

Fifteen years of Peppy Helpfulness – I can't fawn like that any more. (Says an exhausted shop worker.)

Fans of harmonic men's groups will get a kick out of the title tune, crooned by an unknown gaggle of gentlemen. (imdb)

Having managed to cremate my lunch, I haven't got the energy to start again, so it's takeaway delivery time. (Tiffer Gilliard)

The problem isn't that FB can't deal with it: it's that the human and algorithmic systems that *could* have been built to deal with it were, instead, implemented as an opaque thicket that profitably fails to deal with it while providing deniability. (Nigel Heffernan)

Don't get started on Matalan’s boys vs girls school uniform. Boys get almost armour-plated fabric where girls have to wear trousers with all the structural integrity of a fairy’s wing. (@SianEldridge)

It is always useful when a parent or relative knows how they want to be interred and tells you about it. Too many people don't tell anybody, and then the bereaved survivors are left to puzzle out (or fight about) whether Auntie wanted it fully hymnal or whether she would want Cousin Sherman to speak. (Brenda W. Clough)

Dehumanising rhetoric was always the tool of identitarianism; its orientation on the political spectrum is irrelevant. These people have not learnt anything from 20th C history. I fear America is about to retake that module. (@tryingattimes)

The establishment, marking their own homework. (Daniel Ribot, in the context of getting someone who doesn’t think racism is a problem to chair an inquiry into racism in the UK.)

I look for serious reforming ideas from Starmer, not just sound-bleats about levelling up or a new tomorrow. (Jonathan Keates)

More here, and links to the rest.