Glossary

Here is a list of unusual terms used on this website. One I have personally created for your pleasure. The others I have mined from the obscure depths of our race memory. Unlike the man who took out a copyright on the words “gay tantra”, and who presumably expects us to pay him a fee whenever we tickle our boyfriends’ bottoms, I offer these words to the public gratis and free of charge. They are not alphabetised.

Snudge

A verb meaning to be idle, as in “She snudged around the house until teatime.” This word, with its definition and example, are taken direct from Dr Johnson’s dictionary, which recently celebrated a centenary, despite the fact that it was published 255 years ago (I’m being facetious: the centenary was Johnson’s). You can imagine how excited I was to discover this word. It is particularly good in conjunction with hyper-modern coinings such as blog. For example, “I spent the morning blogging and snudging.”

Glotz

A verb meaning to look at or watch, as in, “I spent my gap-year in Florence glotzing the marble buttocks of Michelangelo statues.” I like it because it can be used to emphasise or question the act of looking, as in, “I would not normally glotz this kind of thing;” or, “I have completely stopped glotzing TV.” I cannot find it in a dictionary, yet I do not remember inventing it. Did I hear it in another language? Dream it? Is it yiddish? Is it from Nabokov? (It appears not be from A Clockwork Orange). All I can say is that it appears to be a hybrid of “glut” and “goggle,” suggesting a greedy or even addictive mode of looking. Any information as to its origins would be gratefully received.

Godzillion

A bona fide creation of my own, this new noun was crafted for your convenience by the careful splicing of “zillion” and “Godzilla”. Of course we will always continue to coin new words to signify a number more huge than the previously coined one. However, “a godzillion” may be confidently used to signify a monstrously huge amount - an amount so huge, in fact, that catastrophic consequences are subtly implied. To some extent this is the noun equivalent of “humungous”, but with a useful topnote of anxiety which the older word lacks. As such it is a very contemporary word, which I fully expect to see hoovered up into the vernacular. Example: “Please tick the box indicating how many sexual partners you have had in the past 12 months: 0 - 5; 6- 10; 11 - 100; a godzillion.”