The English language has somewhere in the neighbourhood of 1,000,000 words even considering that the Oxford English Dictionary only lists 171,476 words in current use, and how can they know to the exact word? Still, our language is growing hourly as it swallows useful little lexical items of its neighbours. It has been doing so at a more leisurely pace for over 1500 years since the Romans left the British Isles for some place warmer. The Aengles and Saxons who moved in to harass the local Britons and their relatives, and the Norse who moved in to harass them all a while later, gradually settled on a common speech to order folks about. Nowadays, this predilection for generating new words is nowhere more evident that in my home, and as I am regularly ordered about, I have catalogued the expressions I have needed to learn.

I believe it was Lewis Carroll who brought the term “portmanteau” into our language to describe a word coinage by sticking two existing words together. He had Humpty Dumpty explain to Alice, saying:

For instance, take the two words "fuming" and "furious". Make up your mind that you will say both words, but leave it unsettled which you will say first ... if you have the rarest of gifts, a perfectly balanced mind, you will say “frumious".

That’s all well and good Humpty, but it doesn’t account for all of the terms that tumble so easily from m’lady’s lips, denoting clearly some precise activities to her but maddeningly opaque to the rest of us, without explicit instruction, the which she is always happy to provide.

When we were travelling in far lands, we would buy vegetables at local markets. B of course had to distribute her purchases over the entire marketplace of women sitting by their stall or blanket, and in China that meant weekly reconnaissance with familiar faces. We usually came away with enough groceries to feed the whole of our teaching cadre for some time. Although the produce had probably been grown in pesticide-free conditions, we were still concerned about ingesting nasty little foreign bugs along with our nutrients and so followed the recommended practice of rinsing them in a tub of water to which we had added a few drops of bleach. This practice, for you the un-informed, is called “flubbling,” as in “Don’t forget to flubble the carrots before you put them away,” or in past tense recriminative, “I don’t think you flubbled the potatoes thoroughly.” At first it sounds as if the word might be a blend of “bubble” and “flush”, but there are no bubbles and nothing is flushed; nevertheless, flubble is now part of our vocabulary, and damned be he (that’s me) who forgets.

Once upon a chemical-happy time, swimming pools were kept sterile with applications of strong chlorine compounds, a nasty member of the periodic table usually associated with warfare as a gas and solvent for almost everything else in its liquid form. On a mundane level it made bathing suits smell. Nowadays, the chlorine component of swimming pool purification systems is significantly lower and may be supplemented with ozone treatment or other gentler antibacterial agents. The result is less irritation to sensitive bathers or to sensitive body parts of bathers such as eyeballs. Still there is that slight chlorine odour detectible by anyone in the “princess’ category sensitive to peas under layers of mattresses, and it is with such an individual that I am blessed. Hence the need for a thorough “flooshing” of bathing suits in a sink full of water to get that residual chlorine out of them.

A good “floosh” is similar in process to a “flubble” but without the hard bits of vegetable material, and it requires a gentler action so as not to splash water on the bathroom floor. And that leads naturally enough to the removal of excess water at the end of the bathers flooshing by a gentle “squooshing” — most emphatically not a wringing out —before hanging the garments up to dry. Other fabrics require more aggressive actions.

Small area mats and carpets are useful when placed in front of kitchen sinks or doorways as catch-alls for things dropped or tracked in. Periodically they need a to be taken outside and given a good thwupping to get rid of that dirt. It is a difficult manoeuvre to execute that, holding an area rug in one hand and beating away on it with the other, sometimes with a tennis racquet or frying pan, but now and again the thwupper will connect with a particularly good satisfying thwap. The release is quite enjoyable in its effect on both rug and psyche.

We use a duvet as a bed covering. They are convenient items and different thicknesses of duvets can be used for summer or winter. At both times though, the down filling will migrate to the bottom of the covering and so a vigorous floofing (lifting) or flumpfing (shaking) of the duvet will be necessary to redistribute the feathers. Doing this late at night after the 11:00 o’clock news when the body is already half asleep will result in a cursory floof or two resulting in inadequate floofination and cold shoulders until the situation is remedied.

Garden care requires its own vocabulary and we have the plonking or thunking of flower pots dependent on the size and weight of the pot and the target. You wouldn’t plonk a little container onto freshly worked soil, that’s more of a plunk. A big container would require a thunk unless it’s going onto patio concrete where plonking is more appropriate. Thereafter it gets as confusing for me as it likely is boring for you. At some point no one cares; just put the damn thing down and hope it grows.

Finally, for this discourse but I am sure not for the coinage of terms, there are the “crinkles” that occur in plastic film that hasn’t been pulled tight over food container. This is probably the closest B gets to M. Dumpty’s true portmanteau, it being the blending as near as I can figure, of “crease” and “wrinkle.” I don’t think the food cares one way or the other, and as M. Dumpty asserted regarding the rights of words vs speakers of words:

‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’
‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’

‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all’

In this household, Alice, there is never any doubt.