I’ll get to what conferior means in a bit, but first this preface.
I had a math teacher in high school whose lifelong dream was to have his made up word make it to the dictionary. I felt sorry for him, partly because that was his lifelong dream, but also because his word—schnibble—was so unnecessary. A schnibble was the small piece of paper created from ripping out looseleaf or notebook paper from its binding. As a mild form of detention, we would have to report to his classroom after school and pick up schnibbles that accumulated on his floor. We would go around looking for these stupid pieces of paper, and he would follow us around while telling us how proud he was of the word schnibble. I always wondered why he didn’t say, “Come back after school and pick up the shit off my floor.” The shit was more apt because other nasty shit got attached to those little pieces of paper.
Alas, sometimes I like to come up with words of my own, I think because of Mr. Whatever-his-name-was-and-I-don’t-care-to-remember.
That brings me to conferior.
con•fe•ri•or
1. adjective: lower in quality, inferior, but outweighed by its remarkable convenience. I’m only drinking Pete’s coffee because it’s conferior, and I don’t feel like walking another 2 blocks for better coffee. I hear they hired her because she was conferior to going through an expensive recruiter to fill the position.
2. noun: a person inferior to another or others, but remarkably convenient. Yes, I know Pete is a conferior, but I’d rather date him than deal with my crippling low self-esteem.
I came up with this word for this awful gym I only go to because it’s just a block away from home. I think I’m such a lazy fuck that many times I settle for conferior. So at least now I have a word for it, and so do you. Enjoy!
[Photo credit: Flickr user caseywest]
I don’t think that the concept of having a word for a “schnibble” is that bad, especially for a high school teacher who hates them. But schnibble is just too long of a word.
I would have liked schnibble more if it weren’t created my own math teacher, the same man who once told me, “I think you’re pretending to be dumber than you are.” How rude! I was just bad at math!
I don’t really make up any fancy words of my own (except by accident, when I say things like “I need a bigger plowerfot for this plant.”), but I would like to go ahead and join the nerderie by pointing out that what you’ve done here is called ‘blending’ in linguistics. The best blend I’ve seen recently was when I saw a woman on Muni read a book called “Relaxercise your way to health.”
oooooh, relaxercise. i like it.
i sense the English language coming to a fiery end.