Grammar: Neologisms 22

If you want wit these days, go to Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads, imdb.com.

USEFUL VOCABULARY
pied-piper professors
earth-grazer (asteroid that just misses us)
ungratiation (@corsent)
where-will-it-end-ism
pin-striped concrete (MK)
stickybeaking (prying, Australian)

pretendian (Someone who poses as a person of Native American descent)
liquid zoo (aquarium)
mop chop (haircut)
furniture Tetris (when moving house, HRT)
keyboard proselytising
post-Semiotic gibberish. (Waldemar Januszcak)
house-fussery
unwelcome mat

Sayersing – switching from flippant murder mysteries to something more character-driven. (Liz Williams)

Pump and dump operation (Boost an idea, buy shares in it, boost it some more, see the price rise, dump your shares, watch it crash. From a piece about driverless cars.)

Not new, but I like the dialect “goyle” for a deep gulley, and the American "mourning-cloak butterfly".

This strange little ante-area. (Martin Roberts, Homes under the Hammer)

Salford Quays is the most nowhere place I’ve ever been. (TC)

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)

Magical thinking. We forget that it doesn’t disappear after age 7 or 8, it just gets built over. (VH)

The people who are orchestrating these schemes haven't read page one of the Ladybird book of ecology! (Chris Packham on HS2)

I'm down to the penicillin-discovering end of the Christmas Stilton. (Rob Chapman @rcscribbler)

Mail readers just want to spend their lives in a state of exaggerated tutting. (LW)

The Times: perpetually gnawing upon the bone of old-white-person resentment over nothing, intentionally inflaming their elderly readers’ spite and grudges with nasty non-stories. (@flying_rodent)

I can sleep at will on a clothes line with a brass band playing underneath. (DC)

In a shared-house quarrel, “Andy has declared himself Switzerland”. (slate.com)

The killer was just the usual guy afraid to lose his share of an inheritance, kind of a behind-the-counter retail creep. (imdb.com)

For the love of goodness, you should file the serial numbers off this story and turn it into a historical novel of the generational sort. (EF)

The cult of righteousness that the Guardian embodies. (Suzanne Moore, unherd.com)

A little Norman archery from Chichester Cathedral. (@Portaspeciosa)

Can’t be doing with high-rise food. Don’t have a flip-top head. (AM)

Anyone who thinks 70s English cookery was some kind of golden age either wasn’t there or has lost their marbles completely. (@PaulbernalUK)

Coronavirus is a “cobbled-together phantom” says @MIM86637799.

Geoffrey Palmer magnificent with Judi Dench playing a crushed-but-impish middle-class non-entity, may he rest in semi-detatched heaven. (@BrynleyHeaven)

Well colour me pink and strike me down with a herring. (NF)

She was a friend "until she married one of Barbara Cartland's sons and rose into the ether". (BSG)

People say that drunks are charming, but it’s just “vacuous bonhomie”. (AP)

A khaki jacket – the kind of bland garment designed to make old people even more invisible than they already are. Tania Unsworth

Rather than bringing some analytical clarity, she did no more than cloak crude rhetorical strategies in academic grandiloquence. (Sam Leith, Unherd.com on Judith Butler)

Why does everything need a label, like there's some mystical gender dymo machine? (@toonmillie)

Gov propaganda re Covid is worse [than the Asda ad] if you’re a radio listener at work all day, usually Jazz FM in my case, the wall-to-wall lowball intellectual pitch and cosy, warm, bobbly-fleece, pseudo-regional voiceovers are quite irritating. (SK)

A branch of my family (well, practically an entire shrubbery) emigrated to England. (@laineydoyle)

Listening to the Small Faces’ Green Circles today and I’d forgotten how much I love Kenney Jones’ “knocking over a huge tower of metal catering trays” drumming. (@Andr6wMale)

From Piccadilly the quiet snoring of the traffic came soothingly up to them. (Margery Allingham, Dancers in Mourning)

Swinging-Sixties tawdriness. (Richard Davenport-Hines on the dire 60s sex comedy Candy)
Punishing miasma of dread. (Kevin Maher on the CGI Cats)

Cardiff post-2000's idea of 'how to look like a capital' being 'build a barrage to create a giant lake, ring it with chain restaurants made of green glass and string, then build 1,000 blocks of probably flammable student flats' is a bit sad given it built Cathays Park once. (@owenhatherley)

There are others who can't be wrong because they can't step outside of an ideology they have glued themselves to. (CW)

The diminutive St Mary Magdalene’s is a weather-beaten majesty. Externally, it’s a patchwork of nibbled clunch, brick, the odd flint nugget, and islands of lime render. Its design incorporates embattled parapets, cinquefoil tracery, and a rather regal south porch. (@friendschurches)

I intend to [photograph this new-build estate] before the flags come down, the hoardings are removed, the show house actually sold and actual humans are unwrapped from their plastic packaging and installed inside these normalisation pods to watch talent-show contests and replace their small allotted sections of greenspace with astroturf. (Max von Seibold)

Hilton and Blackman show all the acting skills of photographic models in a clothing catalogue. (imdb)

But then you got to the part about her essentially boasting about a history of drug addiction and embezzlement, and the scary staccato violin music started playing in the background. (slate.com)

We've ended up with a Cabinet full of Skeletor's minions and call-centre middle managers. (@garius)

I don’t bubble-wrap my words. (Dr Em, a brain-injury survivor)

More here, and links to the rest.