Mark started it by asking, “What’s the Perth equivalent of Melbournite or Sydneysider? Would it be Perthian? Perthan?” Several dictionaries later, and after consulting her relations, WA-raised Sally replied, “Perthite.”
But it was too late. “Perthian” had already entered Mark’s personal lexicon.
As the project progresses, we have captured interesting or silly words and phrases on our whiteboard. The ‘word of the day’ list is starting to take over, and we’ll soon be forced to remove some other notes and drawings from the board.
Here is the list, to date.
- Perthian (Perthan)
- floordrobe
- misunderestimated
- TSPFKAR — the survey people formerly known as Rodski
- verbatimly
- threading
- calendating — making a date by putting an entry into somebody’s online calendar
- thesaurity
- glob
- cadence
- mutualised
- monomaniac
- Melbounrne (which we saw on a piece of (temporary) campus signage that had been produced by the communciations office — whoopsie)
- tasseography
- you could almost hear the eyes rolling
- anonymised but famous
- legends in their own lunchtime
- (Give it a) book dust rating
- Steeting Committee (an accidentally misnamed Word document; paradoxically, the typo made the task of finding that document on our fileserver much easier)
- podslurping
- whuffie
- Pteraflop, the prehistoric bird of storage (see image below – click to enlarge), and its close relative Nannaflop
- repteratorialising (re terra tor ialising)
- strandsy bits
- fruit salad strategy
- Why use a carrot when a stick will have the opposite effect?
It doesn’t mean much — just a footnote to the many other bits of jargon flying around our bit of the cubefarm. It’s also a sign that the project team has gelled — we have found a common sense of humor and can enjoy playing word games together.
