I am so delighted with Joshua Cohen’s Book of Numbers that here I’ve picked out my favorite neologisms from the work (earlier post on the book here).
- Adverks sales: The industrial activity of advertising—onvertising, online advertising
- Recs, rectards, rectarded, recy: One of the most colorful and widely used descriptors in the book. Techs are sophisticated users, and then there’s recs, recreational ones. For instance, Principal describes the company’s new New York office as being filled with “Divisions requiring minimal intelligence. Minimal skill. Not techs but recs.” And Principal’s father as having subscribed to a “cruft of rectarded netservices whose chief goal was to keep their users within the walled garden by providing a sense of community, along with local news and weather, only so as like not to lose them to the wilds of the web…”
- Lusers: Loser users
- Plastiwicker: Those cheap plastic chairs formed to look like wicker
- Laptopped: Your probable current condition, dear reader
- Fannypackers: Wearers of fanny packs
- Acqhires: Workers “hired” through acquisition of their company
- Lotused: Something that Steve Jobs might do
- Comptrasting: To both compare and contrast
- Octalfortied: Forgotten
- Concentives: The name Cohen gave to a mystery shopper company. Seems perfect for a social media marketing company
- Crustaceate: A crabwalk. To index internet sites like a crab, compare with “spider” or “crawl”
- Glomars: Presumably a reference to the Glomar Explorer—a project so secret that one cannot disclose its existence or non-existence. We learn from the book that Tetration is spying on its users and perhaps framing them for crimes by suggesting content.
- Lynchrims: “…situations in which one human hangs lynched without clothes from a tree while another human stands just below and rims their anus.”
- Compocalypse: Computer related disaster
Useful words I learned from Book of Numbers
Resensed
Pantophagy
Steatopygous
Goutish
Verbigeration 🙂