Je suis fou pour des mots

No other word or phrase comes close to describing the dusty, gritty, reeking task of clearing the lumps out of a catbox as the word my two sons coined in 1994: de-frag. The family has used it ever since.

How a new word came to be:

Due to the less-than reliable electrical power in the compound and country where we once lived, every appliance needed its own heavy-duty surge protector; some needed voltage regulators. Our computer was always crashing, vulnerable to frequent electricity spikes. Plus, just about every piece of software was incompatible with everything else (especially the dubiously "genuine" programs locally available), causing frequent crashes and freezes. So we often ran computer virus and other scans and a disk defragmenter program. Our 12 and 14-year-old sons quickly mastered the tech-speak. "De-fragment" became de-frag, then was quickly applied to the most dreaded of chores, cleaning the catbox. Thus was coined a word that precisely catches the nuances of the task it describes and names: de-frag.

De-frag, verb, to remove fragments. Just remember, it began in 1994, with two boys and a small white cat named Simba.

While visiting friends living on the eastern coast of Australia in 1999, I heard a familiar word used in an unexpectedly offbeat and yet perfecly descriptive way. My friend's teenage daughters, to describe the often pungent and alternately arrayed one-time flower children and their younger grunge meets neo-hippie counterparts, used a term new to me: the "ferals." Succinct.

In addition to collecting "new" words, I have an affection for those wonderfully quirky lost-in-translation contributions to linguistics, the results of what happens when two (or more) languages collide.

For example:
The gas station where we frequently filled up in that country in the Arabian Gulf (they did NOT call it the Persian Gulf there) had polite warning signs by all the pumps: "Please close the motor." It took me a few gallons (or more precisely, liters) to get that one.

Another example:
Many of the fuel trucks had large danger signs painted down the entire length of the tanks, the English translation just to the left of each piece of Arabic calligraphic script: (Arabic script) FIRE! (Arabic script) DANGER! (Arabic script) QUICK! Personally, I think it could have been more comprehensibly translated into English as "Danger! Flammable!" However, as I was the one who couldn't read the original writing, what would I know?