{"id":535,"date":"2006-01-10T10:07:53","date_gmt":"2006-01-10T18:07:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/archives\/2006\/01\/10\/i-need-the-word-for\/"},"modified":"2006-01-10T10:07:53","modified_gmt":"2006-01-10T18:07:53","slug":"i-need-the-word-for","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/archives\/2006\/01\/10\/i-need-the-word-for","title":{"rendered":"I need the word for\u2026"},"content":{"rendered":"

While lying abed this morning, a question popped into my mind: \u201cYou know how sometimes things go sour abruptly and you have this detached sense of watching your life collapse in slow motion? What\u2019s the family-friendly word for that?\u201d<\/p>\n

There are over 500,000 words in the English language, and most of us have never heard 80% of them. Take didapper<\/a>, for example. It\u2019s a real word (a small grebe<\/a> as it turns out), but you\u2019ve likely never even heard it. You are no doubt an articulate speaker with a wide-ranging vocabulary, and yet you couldn\u2019t pick a didapper out of a lineup if it mugged you. Grebe is just five letters and yet if I played it in Scrabble you\u2019d make me whip out a dictionary to prove it was real.<\/p>\n

There are hundreds of thousands of words just like that. There must be one for this! Everyone I\u2019ve asked knows exactly the feeling I\u2019m describing, and yet they can\u2019t think of a polite name for it.<\/p>\n

In case you\u2019re still confused about that feeling, here are some other descriptions:<\/p>\n