NTMP 111: Pop Tart School

Decant this.

New-To-Me Phrases, May 26, 2024

Floordrobe * Fruiton * Plumicorns * Plonk * Chocolate school * Soylent but deadly * Bildungsroman * Performative pantry

I love when Great Horned Owls make this “You’re shitting me, right?” expression. Photo by Paul Morley on Unsplash

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The Phrases, With Context

Hello there! If you’re in the U.S. I hope you’re enjoying the long holiday weekend. Did anyone else get a “Happy Memorial Day!” message from a colleague or brand? I saw a .gif in the wild this week. #awkward #thinkitthrough

We had friends over yesterday for our annual Memorial Day BBQ and the weather was unbelievably gorgeous. A perfect day with perfect weather, great company and so much food. A+

Are you ready for some phrases? This week, we have unnecessary home trends, a bevy of portmanteaus, owl mood trackers, and more.

Let’s get to it!

1. Floordrobe

My friend Liz casually dropped this beauty of a portmanteau into a recent conversation, and I was both immediately smitten and called out. They did not coin it and couldn’t recall the source, but floordrobe describes the habit that some of us (ahem) have of leaving clean and clean-enough clothes on the floor instead of putting them away. I actually have more of a wallhookdrobe and ottomandrobe but floordrobe rhyming with wardrobe is just too good.

2. Fruiton

Another portmanteau! I love these funny little mashups! This one cracks me up every time I think of it, and it comes to us via NTMP mega-fan Rebecca.

Here’s the tweet:

So, great joke but also . . . a non-AI designer would not give the bananas stems on both ends. You can allegedly buy a similar sofa from a website and brand that both look fake for between “$5,966.95 – $6,422.95.” But if you’re on a budget, Alibaba has banana bean bag chairs that look really uncomfortable.

3. Plumicorns

I knew this owl fact but not the word associated with it. The feather tufts on the great horned owl are neither ears nor horns, but just feathers. And they’re called . . . plumicorns!

Here’s a great explainer from Avian Behavior on Insta:

avianbehavior

A post shared by @avianbehavior

If you’re not into clicking to watch, she explains that plumicorns are like the eyebrows of the owl world and you can use them to try and gauge an owl’s mood. Also, the great horned owl isn’t the only species with plumicorns—the short-eared and long-eared owls also have them. (Be sure to click that long-eared owl link for some extremely goofy photos.)

4. Plonk

I’ve been finding more words and phrases in the daily word games I play, which goes to show you that opportunities to learn new words and phrases are everywhere.

According to the word game Phoodle, plonk is:

[a] term originating from Australian slang and integrated into British vocabulary, referring to cheap, low-quality wine typically consumed only when no other options are available.

Seems legit, but it got me wondering . . . sure, plonk is fun to say, but why that word?

I found this post on a wine site that cites the Oxford Companion to Wine (Fourth Edition):

“During the First World War the French vin blanc with its un-English nasal vowels was adapted in various fantastic ways from ‘Von Blink”’which sounded like a German Officer to plinketty plonk which suggested the twanging of a banjo. This was shortened to ‘plonk’, which coincidentally was also British soldiers slang for mud. By the second World War this had given rise to A/C plonk for aircraftman second class, the lowest of low in the RAF and hence parallel to plonk in the glass.

“Despite its etymology plonk need not be white and if the word suggests any kind of wine in particular it is cheap red served at a party. For this reason colour-blind theories have sometimes been proposed, such that it mimics the sound of cork being withdrawn from a bottle.”

My search for more info on the origin of this word brought me to a treasure trove of knowledge, World Wide Words, curated by Michael Quinion.

Quinion’s research into plonk followed a similar path to the Oxford Companion, but he added this tidbit:

Plonk started to become known in the UK only in the 1950s, partly because ordinary Brits started to drink wine, and in part because of increased exposure to Australian English, of which one factor may have been Nevil Shute’s well-known novel about Australia, A Town Like Alice of 1950, in which it appears.

World Wide Words was Quinion’s retirement project, and he stopped updating it in 2017, but the archive is robust. Be sure to read his bio; he’s led a rich life driven by curiosity and language: Oxford physicist, BBC radio commentator, audio engineer, founder of a cider museum (what?), and lexicographer. My kind of person! He also curated Affixes, a site that catalogs prefixes and suffixes.

I find Aussie slang fascinating and have written about it before, where the nerds at the Australian National Dictionary Centre (a place I would absolutely visit) are cataloguing it.

5. Chocolate school

This phrase isn’t supposed to be funny, because it describes an actual thing, but it makes me laugh every time I read it. It sounds like something a kid would make up when asked what kind of school they’d love to attend. Found via David Lebovitz, whose newsletter is always a joy to read not just for the recipes but for his stories about life in France as a longtime expat.

6. Soylent but deadly

My pal Dennis Lee writes two Substacks, Food is Stupid and The Party Cut - one features exceptionally disgusting food experiments and the other is an insider’s guide to the best Chicago eats.

Soylent but deadly is en excellent joke, as is Soylent Brown, the title of a recent edition of Food is Stupid, where he reviews the meal replacement product unironically named after the sci-fi cult classic movie Soylent Green. Because optimizing bros gonna optimize.

A micro review from that post: Soylent causes “extinction level farts.”

7. Bildungsroman

This whopper of a word appears in the introduction to Adam Moss’ book, The Work of Art, which itself is a work of art. Moss, a magazine editor turned painter, set out to learn more about the creation process as a way to understand his own art. The result is this tome containing 40-plus interviews of a spectrum of artists, with photos of their works in process. I’m only a couple of chapters in and it’s a captivating read if you’re interested in how creative minds work.

I’m an English lit major and I’d never seen the word bildungsroman, which is (unsurprisingly) a German term for a novel that covers the span of a character’s life and their growth as a person. Bildungs = education and roman = novel, according to Merriam-Webster.

8. Performative pantry

Deb Perelman at Smitten Kitchen Digest linked to this piece in Food and Wine, How Your Pantry Looks Says a Lot About Who You Are. It’s subtitled “The performative pantry must be stopped.”

It turns out something we already knew is true: we don’t need to waste our time and money buying clear containers made from fossil fuels to store our groceries, known as “decanting” on social media. Trends like these epitomized by The Home Edit make my teeth hurt. I like a clean and tidy space but have also always been okay with my home looking like someone lives in it.

This piece links to a great Eater story that notes the environmental impact of purchasing a bunch of plastic shit we don’t need.

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Bonus Bits

1. So I’m shopping at Walmart—again—and . . .

2. Orcas are at it again!

And I can’t get enough. Orcas aren’t attacking boats, they’re just playful teens, scientists say. Via WaPo, gifted link. Did I add this to my ongoing list of great headlines? Yes. Yes I did.

Read about orca antics as previously covered in NTMP. They’re just bored teens, emerging from bedrooms that smell like the worst feet-and-balls mashup without warning to clear out your un-decanted pantry like locusts.

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That’s it for this week! Remember to keep making it weird, and stay furiously curious.