snow day brings new vocabulary

[zanzjan]

One of the plusses of working at a university is that if the university closes for a snow day, I get the day off paid. Which, since the elder child also had school canceled today, makes for a quiet day at home instead of having to find a way to slog through the nasty mess outside.

I did get a bit of extra sleep this morning, in bits and pieces around fussy babies, phone calls, and the furnace guys coming for the final service (still running, yay!) Somewhere in there I dreamed that I was reading a book and in it I came across a word I didn't know: discrepite. Yes, I woke up and remembered the imaginary word I didn't know, though sadly nothing else about the substance of whatever I was reading in my dream.

It occurred to me after I'd woken up that there was at least some small possibility it was a real word after all, or that it was sufficiently composed of real-word bits to be interpretable. I resolved that I would at some point in the next day or so ping mlp367, who is my favorite uber-word-geek, and get him to make a pronouncement on what the most logical possible meaning of my new word could be. However, I later dozed off again and in my dream solved my own problem: I was surprised to discover that discrepite was actually a noun, and that it was the word for a large robot whose job it was to carry around dead people.

Comments

[zanzjan.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it's definitely taken on enough life as an idea to start making story happen. In my current take on it, the robots don't understand that being alive is an integral part of existence -- after all, they aren't alive and they continue to function -- so they are naively trying to "assist" these dead people to go on with their lives as if nothing has changed.

[jeffsoesbe.livejournal.com]

I like that direction on the concept! Could be very psychologically interesting...

Go for it!

- yeff