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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1452 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for September 25, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Irregardless

Nice example!

I like messing around with words more in person around my young kids. Along with dad jokes. It's interesting which words they notice as fake and which ones they believe are real.

Heh, glad you were picking up what I was putting down! That one's still ironic usage for me, but others, like conversate, have been instant classics that I've gleefully adopted.

I have seen cromulent used many times on this very forum without comment.

Not all of the modern embiggenings of the lexicon are bad.

I won't say no to the accusation that I only spend time with oldies, at least as far as English speakers, but I find many terms often used online are almost never spoken (except by people who are, perhaps, very often online). Overton Window, Dunbar number, etc. In particular in these virtual pages I regularly encounter terms that seem shibolleth-like. Every culture (even an online culture) develops its own sociolect, I suppose.

I assume it's inevitable. In case you're interested, "embiggen" and "cromulent" are both fake words invented by The Simpsons. But the terms you're flagging are existing terms from the sorts of papers that fed into the intellectual groundwater of upstream communities in the 2000s-2010s IMHO, rather than "extremely online" or "rationalist(-adjacent/-descendant)" or "online right" shibboleths/inventions.

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