Daily candy is dandy

For the past six years, DailyCandy, a pop-culture e-newsletter that spots trends, has been identifying words and phrases pushing their way into everyday conversation. Lexicon, an occasional feature on DailyCandy.com, lists new entries, some of them DC inventions. Here's a sampling from a St. Petersburg Times story:

locationship: a relationship based solely on proximity, such as with your neighbor.

carpartment: an automobile used as a secondary home.

rainxiety: stress induced by driving in even the lightest drizzle.

textual harassment: a proposition via text message, often sent by lazy or shy men to women they are interested in dating.

manbiguous: a term to describe a guy who possesses both masculine and feminine traits.

altarcation: an angry dispute between the couple regarding the details of the ceremony.

carb bomb: an assortment of fresh breads served before breakfast, lunch or dinner.

case (verb): to use ALL CAPITAL LETTERS in an e-mail. Also known as virtual shouting.

chirping: walking through a parking lot, remote in hand, pressing lock/unlock repeatedly in a last-ditch effort to find your car.

e-mnesia: the condition of having sent or received an e-mail and having no recollection of it whatsoever.

frequent liar: someone who boasts incessantly about traveling to places he/she has never been.

gastrick bypass: the act of filling one's tank in $5 increments in the misguided hope that gas prices will soon come down.

hybris: excessive pride based on one's hybrid car.

skimplify: to reduce the amount of cloth used to cover the body.

Use it three times and it's yours

Here's a word you'll want to make part of your daily vocabulary, particularly at that next corporate meeting: bootylicious. The first recorded use occurred circa 1992 when rapper Snoop Dogg used it to describe someone with weak rap lyrics. Since then, the word has made a long journey into the realm of the positive. And the big-time. In 2004, the Oxford English Dictionary included it with this definition: 1. A term of commendation of rap lyrics. 2. Very sexually attractive. (Blend of booty buttocks and delicious.)

We wish we had a transcript of the OED scholarly discussion.

Jump!

Have you been hearing a lot about people jumping the couch and jumping the shark and wondered what was going on? Then head to the popular Web site urbandictionary.com. Or better yet just keep reading here. It usually takes about 10 years after a word's first use for it to be added to the Oxford English Dictionary. But it takes only a day or so to get on urbandictionary.

Days after Tom Cruise's light-headed appearance on "Oprah," when he leaped onto a couch to celebrate his engagement to Katie Holmes, the term "jump the couch" appeared on the word Web site, meaning the moment when someone officially goes off the deep end. "Jump the couch" is a spin-off of "jump the shark," which describes the moment when a TV show starts to decline. We shouldn't have to tell you it refers to the "Happy Days" episode in which Fonzie overcomes his fear of sharks by jumping over one on water skis.

Yakasses lost in a fauxcellarm

Barbara Wallraff writes a syndicated column "Word Court." Her most recent book, "Word Fugitives: In Pursuit of Wanted Words," contains hundreds of new words designed to meet new needs.

People who blabber loudly and annoyingly on cell-phones in public? Yakasses.

Disposable plastic bags caught in trees? Fouliage.

The momentary confusion people experience when they hear a cell phone ringing and wonder whether it's theirs? Fauxcellarm or phoneundrum.

The irrational fear when you're throwing a party and fear that no one will show up? Guestlessness or empty-fest syndrome.

Jumping the pangram

Renowned word maven Richard Lederer has a special place in his heart for the pangram, a sentence that uses all 26 letters of the alphabet. Here's Lederer's pangram riff, passed along by word-lover Stan Angrist, who runs a Scrabble-playing group.

The classic typing exercise, "The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog," employs every letter at least once, but it uses 33 in all. These sentences use the entire alphabet with fewer letters:

Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs. (32)

Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz. (31)

How quickly daft jumping zebras vex. (30)

Quick wafting zephyrs vex bold Jim. (29)

Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex Bud. (28)

Bawds jog, flick quartz, vex nymph. (27)

Mr. Jock, TV quiz Ph.D., bags few lynx. (26!)

For more, go to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pangram. Pass along other 26ers of your own invention to The Morning File.

If you want to play Scrabble, join Stan's group tonight from 7 to 10 at Carnegie Mellon University on the second floor of the University Center. On Friday, Stan goes to Phoenix for the five-day National Scrabble Association tournament. sangrist@verizon.net.

Take my banana fold . . . please

Fat removal has become the most popular cosmetic surgery procedure, as America continues its war on love handles, turkey wattles and saddlebags. To help doctors understand the exact locations their patients are describing, the journal Dermatologic Surgery published "Lexicon of Areas Amenable to Liposuction." According to The New York Times, patients are now asking for liposuction of the "buffalo hump" (upper back), the "wings" (bulges around the bra area), the "doughnut" (around the belly button), the "banana fold" (below the buttocks), the "piano legs" (calves) and the "chubb," a Southern term for the kneecap area.

Just don't ask for a doughnut when you get hunger pangs while waiting in the operating room for a simple Chubb.