A Short List of Terms I Probably Invented
Every now and then, I find that I need to reference a phenemonon or experience for which I lack an adequate label in English. In these moments, I search for a term that will capture the meaning I intend and make the concept easier to repeatedly refer to. Since I have introduced these and other terms into my personal lexicon, I find myself cognizing them more readily and using them as labels to conceptualize the world around me. I’ve already used a few of them in print, too. I will probably update this list as I invent more terms. Feel free to start using them in whatever ways you see fit. With enough use, maybe I’ll even see them show up in a dictionary someday. The purpose of a dictionary, after all, is to record common use of language.
Anti-lucid dream
An anti-lucid dream is one that shares one of the critical qualities of a lucid dream (e.g., self-awareness, rational faculties, and the ability to question whether you are dreaming). An anti-lucid dream differs from a lucid dream because upon analyzing whether you are dreaming, you come to the rational conclusion that you are somehow not, no matter how impossible it may seem. You accept the dream as real. You fully embrace this impossible dream world, even while retaining memories of your waking life, struggling to integrate the two.
Book diving
The opposite of skimming a book. Skimming a book is what happens when the meaningful content of a book is so sparse that the mind realizes it doesn’t actually have to read every word, or even every sentence or paragraph, to get the bulk of the useful information from it. It starts to jump around, looking for the next useful chunk that it can stitch together with the previous ones.
With a book sufficiently dense in meaning, you might stop after every paragraph or two to consider the implications of what you’ve read and integrate them into your paradigm. As a result, you spend 90% of your reading time thinking. With this type of reading, the whole is more than the sum of the parts because the book generates new thoughts in you not explicitly contained in its text. I can think of no better single metric for the quality of a book.
Book treading
If skimming is reading in such a way that we can ignore much of the text and fill in the gaps in our minds, and diving is reading in such a way that we have to put extra effort into considering the additional meaning imbued into the text, then the middle ground could be considered “book treading.” Book treading is when reading and thinking reach homeostasis at a 1:1 ratio. You skim above the surface of the water, barely getting wet. You dive underneath to be fully submerged in it. You tread water to maintain a stable state of being in the water but not underneath it.
Coffee nirvana
The short-lived state of pure bliss and focus acheived by drinking just the right amount of coffee under just the right conditions of tiredness.
Culturebot
Someone whose actions are primarily influenced by adherence to the unconscious standards of their culture. The opposite is someone who consciously assesses their actions and makes choices based on their inherent values through self-awareness. Used on the Mission Statement page for my blog about cultural deprogramming in Kalavan, Armenia:
“Obviously, it’s not a foregone conclusion that once you are exposed to the possibility of a dog sleeping on a human’s bed, you will want a dog to sleep on yours. There must be some other factor present that makes you want it. Your experiences do not determine your preferences. You are not a culture-imitating machine or culturebot. You have your own emotions, nature, and capacity for critical thinking and self-analysis. We can only say you become aware of more possibilities through your experiences, not that they determine your values for you.”
Cultural supremacist
A culturebot who insists on spreading their cultural programming to others or defending it against intrusion from others because they believe it to be inherently better than all others.
Ideollergic reaction
Everyone has an ideological immune system (I wish I had invented this term, but I first heard it in a lecture series by Jay Stuart Snelson). It’s a psychological defense system that prevents information that challenges established paradigms from taking root in the mind. Accordingly, we can all have “ideological allergic” reactions to information, which can be portmanteaud into “ideollergic.”
When one’s ideological immune system erroneously treats harmless ideas as harmful, just like a biological allergic reaction. Both terms are used in my book Everyone Is an Entrepreneur:
“The more identified someone becomes with the way they see the world, the more likely they are to experience inordinately negative emotional outbreaks, like allergic reactions of their ideological immune system, to definitions and ideas that contradict what they already believe. “Ideollergic reactions” function much the same way physical allergic reactions do by causing us to treat harmless unfamiliar substances as aggressive foreign invaders. That is the primary reason why it can be so difficult to convince people of new ideas or even to question the merit and structure of their old ones.”
Margin of Idiot
The phrase “margin of error” describes the expected possibility of something predictable going wrong in any complex plan. Pack more food than you think you will need for a camping trip just in case the car breaks down and you end up staying out there a day or two longer than you planned to.
The “margin of idiot” is a specialized application of the margin of error. It asks you to take into account the possibility that some human actor will do something tremendously stupid at some stage of your plan that derails the outcome. It applies only to tasks that you should reasonably expect everyone involved to be able to do in the context you are depending on them to act in. If the bagger at the grocery store decides to put your carton of eggs at the bottom of a bag of heavy items, thus causing them to break and spill raw egg all over your car on the way home, you’ve been a victim of the margin of idiot. There was no reason for you to personally verify your items were not bagged in an idiotic way because you should have been able to expect basic competence in this domain.
Recently, a whole team of post office workers had never heard of the country of Thailand, which delayed the process of my sending a package there by about 20 minutes and made me late to some important meetings. It was perfectly reasonable of me to expect people who work in a post office to be aware of major countries and how to send packages there. It’s part of their job description, and I certainly can’t be the first person here to have ever mailed something to Thailand. My mistake was expecting the people my plan depended on not to be complete idiots.
Normie protocol
The social path of least resistance. The default state of functioning that aligns most closely with all cultural and social expectations and therefore requires the least conscious effort. People (and culturebots in particular) default to normie protocol when they stop consciously assessing themselves, their environment, and their actions.
Paragraphical mitosis
When a long paragraph gets split into multiple smaller paragraphs in the process of editing. Used in my book The Influential Author:
“At this stage, you might also employ a tactic I refer to as “paragraphical mitosis,” which is when you divide a single paragraph into two as its concepts are separated and expanded into new groupings. Maybe the first or final sentence in a paragraph isn’t perfectly connected with all the others but is too important to delete. You can break the rogue sentence off from its paragraph and elaborate on it with another sentence or a few. You can also perform mitosis anytime a paragraph grows to absurd lengths because you keep thinking of new details to add. Just find the most appropriate point of separation and let line breaks do the rest.”
Recategorization Paralysis
The moment of pause and reflection when you read something that clarifies a longstanding point of confusion in your mind and forces you to recategorize large amounts of chaotic information in your mind. This happens frequently when you are book diving an especially dense and well-written book.
Sky top
The opposite of “rock bottom.” Rock bottom is the lowest or worst possible experience of an aspect of reality. When an aspect of your life or an experience has reached the pinnacle of goodness and can’t possible be improved upon, it has reached sky top.
Rock bottom feels dense, heavy, and constricting. Sky top feels light, airy, and ethereal, as though it is difficult to even firmly categorize because it seems to break the bounds of how we typically think of the range of possible experience. It’s like finding a cheat code for life, something that seems impossible or like you’re on drugs.
We can even extend this to other turns of phrase. Instead of “between a rock and a hard place” to describe something even worse than what you thought was the worst, you can say “between the sky and a soft place.” You didn’t even know things could be this good.
Vanityposting
Any post made on social media the primary purpose of which is to satisfy the poster’s vanity. This includes all forms of humblebragging about minor life accomplishments, over-indulgent selfies to show off how good one looks (at least, from a specific angle and under specific lighting conditions while wearing specific clothing and with makeup applied in a specific way), and virtually anything where young women go out of their way to look as sexually attractive as possible for masses of strangers online.
But wait. Isn’t that just normal social media posting? Yes, mostly. Most people are incredibly vain. I’m just putting a label to it so we’ll know it when we see it. Vanityposting is a major part of normie protocol.
Vowel movement (a.k.a. supervowel or vowelarrhea)
A fusion of many vowel sounds strung together without interruption from a consonant (like a diphthong on steroids). Used in my upcoming book Our Global Lingua Franca:
“That’s also what makes it hard for foreign learners to isolate certain vowel sounds without inadvertently sliding into one of the other nearby vowels that they are more accustomed to voicing. It’s like walking on ice compared to the hard concrete of consonants. They can even blend many vowels into one elongated sliding supervowel (or vowel movement or vowelarrhea) across the entire vowel range. Practicing vowel pronunciation feels more like a singing lesson than an English one. But if they can train their throat to isolate and hold every common English vowel sound, they will have a much easier time pronouncing each correctly as they come across it in a new word.”
Idiom: “Like Mozart trying to play the tuba.”
Describes when someone adept at something regresses to a novice level at something related but for which there isn’t an adequate transfer of skill. Mozart was a masterful piano player. His skill as a musician was unparalleled. But you can imagine how limited he would be trying to play at the same level on an unfamiliar (and especially cumbersome) instrument like the tuba. Mozart could probably figure out how to play a couple simple songs on the tuba, like Happy Birthday or Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, but there’s no way he would be anywhere near as skilled as he was on the piano.
This is how I felt when trying to learn the Armenian language despite a lack of quality books or teachers and the fact that virtually no native Armenian speakers would agree to use their language with me. When I finally figured out simple phrases and basic conversational skills on my own, I got a lot of praise for being able to say anything competent in the language at all. But in my mind, I could only compare my stilted progress in Armenian to my adeptness at expressing myself in English. I felt as though someone had just complimented Mozart on his ability to play a few notes on the tuba.