Home of the Snarkmaiden

Riffing off the notion of an idiolect and in imitation of David Levine and Kate Yule's documenting their household's private or idiosyncratic terms and phrases to explain what they mean and where they come from, I give you the idiolexicon - a lexicon of idiosyncratic or personal linguistic usage. I've been meaning to document some of our household's idiolect for a while, as Hal does from time to time, and since I've now managed to remember three entries for long enough to get to a keyboard, I can begin.

breathed on - adj. - A stock item that has been altered after-market to get better performance. Borrowed from the world of auto mechanics and racing; presumably the imagery is mythological, referring to a god breathing life, soul, or spirit into previously inert manner. As in the sentence, "Yeah, that looks like a stock Mustang, but the engine's been bored out and gotten nitrous injection; it's been seriously breathed on."

Since then, we have been to Las Vegas. - Our assessment of the subject has been revised, usually upward, not because the thing changed, but because our contextual knowledge is greater now. Derived from an interview of a Formula 1 racing driver, who was racing in the Long Beach Grand Prix, raced through the city streets of Long Beach for the second year in a row. When asked what he thought of the race course, he said, "This year, the course is much better." "But," sputtered the interviewer, "The course is exactly the same as last year!" "Ah," said the driver, "But since then, we have been to Las Vegas." The Las Vegas course at that time was created by the expediency of setting traffic cones in one of the hotel-casino parking lots.

a fast pig - n. - a project executed for speed rather than beauty, finesse, or accuracy. Comes from a family story of my Dad's school days. The teacher had offered a prize to the student who could draw a pig the fastest. Dad sweated at the chalk board over an anatomically accurate drawing while his competitor drew a telegraphic concatenation of circles, triangles, and a spiral curlicue tail. Dad's pig was the better drawing, but his competitor won the prize, because the charge had been to produce the fastest pig, rather than the best.