neologisms/distinguished terms/noticed phenomena/whatever

▪️ SayTheLining — "One thing,"

if your brain starts to say "I don't know why, it doesn't even matter how (etc)", good for you, so does everyone else's who knows this song. choosing to vocalize this this is SayTheLine-ism, which is just vocalizing that your brain has functional pattern recognition. this is a thing people can do to believe they're interacting with others when in fact they're saying nothing; they're not actually having a conversation.

to put this into context, you could say "hey, did you know I really like dried prunes?" and this would be infinitely more information than if you completed a lyric pattern -- and I mean literally infinite, because the amount I have learned from knowing your brain can complete patterns is zero (everyone's can) but the amount I've learned from knowing you enjoy dried prunes tells me that you like prunes as a category, and also are open to dried fruit, and might have other uncommon food preferences as prunes are not a typical fruit choice.

(your brain, maybe: "but I do this a lot and like doing it" — you have the choice to not do this; some people have tics they can't control and wish they had your level of choice. but yes, there are lots of bad conversational habits people have that they insist on doing until they die. you can choose to never develop yourself if you insist. this is one of several deep ADHD habits I used to do that I don't anymore. other habits include interrupting people / cutting people off in conversation and having no standards of conversational relevance. there are probably more, but those come up immediately. you are not entitled to be excused from this because you have ADHD. many of us with ADHD undo these behaviors; they are not inevitabilities.)

(more info at: facebook.com/1441668545/posts/10226795690025285)

▪️ Comfort Class: any class of person whose socioeconomic position (not necessarily their resources) enables the option to shelter themselves from adversity in a way that fosters or prolongs fragility; essentially, classes that are able to seek comfort for long periods if they so choose, rather than classes that don't have the option.

this is worth distinguishing from "pmc" or "white liberal upper middle class (etc) (etc)" because the following groups are not necessarily upper middle class or even middle class, but tend to be decisively comfortable nonetheless due to their combination of youth, resources, and ability to shelter from adverse events:

- graduate students
- dependas
- boyfriends/girlfriends of wealthy people who can't, strictly speaking, be counted as that same "class" as they don't share income
- in some but not all cases, egirls
- in some but not all cases, NEETs

"middle class" has so dominated american class discourse for nearly the entire time I've been alive that I've coined and used "comfort class" to more adequately summarizes these differences. what "comfort class" gets at is not that a certain class is happier with more money, but rather that:

- when comfort class, key unsexy milestone problems are alleviated. there are SIGNIFICANT LIFE PROBLEMS either solved or prevented by being in a certain social position -- usually income, but not always. for example, family of the comfort class can (income or not) get regular car maintenance and extracurricular classes and therapy; the rest of the population can't as easily, so they'll save up a month's paycheck on a car emergency and their extracurriculars won't look as impressive and they can't say they've Done The Work by going to therapy. (and no, eight piddling sessions of sliding scale therapy does not even kind-of accomplish the effect of going for years on your family health care plan, which is the more common thing.)

- it crosses a threshold where influence is much likelier. culturally speaking, many and probably a majority of the first world's most influential people will be comfort class and they play a silent role in what is acceptable. this is weirdly not true of celebrities however, insofar as celebrities are often an authentic example of middle class or poor people significantly influencing culture.

keep in mind (because it's easy to lose mind of this) that this is not strictly an income situation. graduate students and housewives are often comfort class in spite of their low individual income, because they have third parties (usually family) who can provide these amenities.

note also that in both situations the comfort class avoids unsexy problems. unsexy economic problems are often embarrassing, e.g. https://www.facebook.com/1441668545/videos/5236054776481164/ -- taking down a murderer is a sexy problem, and this is why comfort class people are extremely okay talking about Abuse™️ as it's the most dramatic and agreed upon sexy problem they face. a class marker of this kind is straight teeth, because most people do not have naturally straight teeth, because braces are a typically $4000-5000 cosmetic treatment that uncomfortable families cannot afford, and unstraight teeth are a thing people try to hide. people who don't have unsexy problems don't like to talk about them; they'd prefer to act as if they don't exist, and middle class or lower people who mention those problems are socioeconomically scaring the hoes. (homelessness is a sexy problem conceptually and extremely unsexy in reality.)

but, once more, what's key to "comfort class" is the ability to self-shelter if desired. a school teacher does not have the resources *nor* the means to do this; a graduate student might not have the resources but has the means; an upper middle class person has the resources but perhaps not the means, though usually does. the commonality to these ideas is that there is a class of person who can sort themselves into comfortable circumstances that prolong fragility *if desired*, hence "comfort class".

▪️ a Carlin (a la george carlin) is where a norm or ideal is conveniently and exactly at your level; everything below you is undesirable, everything beyond you is bad.

the classic example george carlin gave is where people driving faster than you are maniacs, and people driving slower than you are idiots. https://youtu.be/XWPCE2tTLZQ

word usage has a Carlin: words beyond your vocabulary are "pedantic" or "big words", but someone is an idiot if they don't understand words with obvious utility that are known well to you.

the "omg you googled me that's creepy" dynamic of modern dating is arguably a Carlin; anyone better at info-gathering than you is a creep or a fed, anyone worse at info-gathering is a bimbo or normie.

▪️ schizmanning -- unlike steelmanning, where you assume the best possible argument, this assumes the worst possible motivation for an argument or behavior. "yeah you may have babysat my daughter and showed up to my wedding and bailed me out of jail at 3am but really that's just what a sociopath trying to get on my good side WOULD DO so, tbh, can't be sure about you"

▪️ schrodingering -- I've now called this "Nellying", but it's the broad parachute for reducing your dialogic intentions to an indeterminable state, such that a person has plausible deniability for what they've said. see: "I was trolling", "I was shitposting", "I was just kidding", "this was useful to me but it no longer is"

▪️Nellying -- my preferred term for schrodingering. Many, perhaps even most people are familiar with the the song Hot In Herre, and this verse:

(to a girl he's dancing with)

Nelly: "I got a pole in the basement 😎"

Girl: "What?"

Nelly: "I'm just kidding like Jason"

Girl: "Oh"

Nelly: "...unless you're gonna do it 👀"

The humor in Nelly's verse is that he articulates the line most men would not say out loud ("unless you're gonna do it"), but nearly all of us are quite aware that THE OVERWHELMING MAJORITY OF MEN PULLING THIS MOVE would not articulate the last line and allow the woman to walk away with the false belief "oh, he was just kidding haha".

Which is, clearly, not "just" kidding and probably not even kidding, it's something else — and since it's a form of falsehood propagation it's still lying, and specifically a Frankfurtian kind of BS. (As in, literally, the paper by Harry G Frankfurt.)

The analogy here is essentially that intentional and deliberate lying is like premeditated violence, while BSing in this way is like reckless negligence, but both type of crimes injure someone, i.e. both types of speech propagate a false belief in someone's mind, just via different mechanisms.

Nellying (using any variation of "I'm just kidding" as a way to dodge accountability) is more BSing than joking, because someone who is kidding-when-it-fails and sincere-when-it-works does not actually have comedic intent; comedic intent is kidding-when-it-fails and kidding-when-it-works — if he Nelly were truly kidding he would have said "lol no I don't actually have a pole in the basement" if the woman agreed to pole dance.

▪️ posture -- a rhetorical setup for a parachute. ("I can't believe I'm even engaging this, but okay...")

▪️ parachute -- an exit from the burden of substantiation. ("okay, I've officially spent too much time on this bs trolling.")

▪️ proof by feeling better than you (fallacy) -- an argument that appeals primarily or solely to the assertion that the person advancing it is in a better emotional state than you are. https://www.facebook.com/1441668545/posts/10226717581552622

▪️ basicing / fallacy of false rudiments -- ad hominem via the creation of a false set of rudiments or preliminaries or basic knowledge, when there is in fact nothing basic of this kind and this is an imaginary hierarchy to discredit someone https://facebook.com/1441668545/posts/10222132204921072

▪️ medium relativism / medium fallacy -- treating P as more true or less true just because it's communicated through a specific medium ("this is just facebook, so holding me to a standard of true/false doesn't apply" / "this isn't logic class, so why are you bringing up logical fallacies")

▪️ epistemic stalling -- a kind of response that forestalls the actual argument or the actual point that will inevitably be the basis of discussion. see below or here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BBhqmha7B2fWX3N3t/epistemic-stalling
"you're just saying that because you're white."
ok, so what if I am not white?
"you're just saying that because you're a man"
and what if I am not a man?
"well, you're straight"
and what if I'm not straight? (I'm not, but for the purposes of this example I am.)
(eventually, either I will hit the identity combo that you prefer, or some other person with the exact same opinion will hit the identity combo you prefer. it's implausible that no person of the ideal identity combination exists who holds that opinion. one will eventually be found. so, it's just a matter of time until you can't rely on these kinds of of objections. you should have the argument that occurs when you run out of these frivolous objections.)

▪️ SMMAL arguments: some/many/most/all arguments -- where an argument amounts to ceding borders of quantities on a map, or landscaping the very marginal territory of words-describing-quantities. (you will find that demarcating the exact abundance of a thing is often not an argument worth pursuing in detail. example: "not all blorpers do slippy" / "well, I think most blorpers do slippy" / "nah in my experience MOST blorpers don't do slippy" / "clearly, many blorpers do slippy though" -- you've probably had this pattern proceed countless times. awareness of fitting the pattern is a quick way to see where it's going and pursue a more meaningful discussion topic.)

▪️ formality blanket -- when a person's formal communication style is a rhetorical strategy / safe space rather than a functional method of communicating. coined in part by Lanni Hammonds. further info: https://facebook.com/1441668545/posts/10227068246799034

▪️ analogy literalism -- people who object to analogies on the literal/superficial aspects of things being compared, rather than the logical relations between the content. ("how could you compare me to a taco")

▪️ sexual exceptionalism -- treating sex as a special category of thing; can be good or bad, but is usually bad. (a person who commits crime X will be seen as a worse person if they also, like, went to a BDSM meetup while hiding from authorities after committing X, rather than say a shopping mall.)

▪️ lawful society bias -- the bias to want to believe that procedures such as law/order are applied equally, evenly and effectively across society (see article). (someone who believes this would be surprised at how often burglaries are successful, for example.)

▪️ officiality fallacy -- the belief that an official or certified status guarantees a specific methodology. ("the SPLC is the official authority on hate groups")

▪️ organizational bias -- the tendency to attribute greater truth value to claims believed to come from an organization ("this came from a news organization, so it is more likely to be accurate than from a credible journalist"). more elaboration here https://alfredmacdonald.com/2013/04/19/dismantling-officiality/

▪️ preferentializing / preference-norm distinction denialism -- "don't like x" / "haters" vs "critics". so a claim of "x is wrong" is rephrased as "you don't like x", a person who is a critic of x is called a "hater" to frame the criticism in terms of emotion

▪️ neologistic agnosticism: https://facebook.com/1441668545/posts/10224541304427054

▪️ thought bleed: a "bleed" is when a small instance of thought (a memory / problem / whatever) influences many other passive thoughts over a larger time period, since the brain scales and emphasizes to passive thoughts what is visible/apparent (availability heuristic) rather than scaling to passive thought the objective length of time spent doing some thing actively. coined in 2016 at http://facebook.com/1441668545/posts/10210743134201422 and empirically validated in 2022 at https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/jan/02/attention-span-focus-screens-apps-smartphones-social-media

▪️ pharmacological essentialism: The view that the harm of a substance is caused by the substance's essential character, rather than the amount of that substance. Largely erroneous, since even arsenic is tolerable at 0.001mg but problematic at mg doses or higher. http://facebook.com/1441668545/posts/10208164557258610

▪️ bubble repair: a kind of confirmation bias where evidence for a comforting belief is sought out up to the point where that belief can be confidently maintained by the believer, but no more than that. elaboration/examples at https://facebook.com/1441668545/posts/10207913373899183

▪️ xenoconstants: aspects of behavior that are permanently different from someone else's. for example, if you know you like music your partner will never like, that is a xenoconstant. https://facebook.com/1441668545/posts/10211811403307482

▪️ xenocidal attraction: when attraction to another person or thing is so strong that it nullifies other attractions you might have had merely by experiencing it. this phenomenon can be used to describe romances, but one everyday example is how you know you won't ever be happy in city A after visiting city B and having a profoundly better experience there; many new york city transplants and tokyo transplants and even austin transplants have had this experience after visiting these respective cities, knowing they'd have to move eventually to be happy because knowledge that the other experience is out there makes their current experience feel inadequate. a contrasting phenomenon would be attraction that is compatible/orthogonal to/does-not-affect other attraction, such as when city A and city B are equally preferable; another phenomenon would be *or* attraction that boosts other attractions (such as when visiting city A enhances your appreciation of city B and vice versa; this would be xenophilic attraction). https://facebook.com/1441668545/posts/10228551720284944

▪️ airdropped emotions: emotions that (1) are not your fault, (2) are not endogenous, (3) are not pharmacological/the result of food or other substance consumption and (4) most importantly, just sort of happened to you in response to external circumstances. one example that happened to me is developing a love for train horn noises because you happen to live next to a set of train tracks that are used at night. another example that happened to me is nostalgia for a parent's smoking habits in childhood; I know it's not something to feel good about, but I have fond memories of it. https://facebook.com/1441668545/posts/10228551733685279

▪️ ooh (as opposed to "woo"): technologies (and ideas) that are justified with "ooh" as an intermediate inference https://app.simplenote.com/p/Xr9YC9

***** SLANG THAT GAINED TRACTION *****
(I don't care about being credited for this)

baythot - a superficial person from the bay area who has the pretension of appearing more rigorous and thoughtful that they are. (examples are unnecessary.)
legbeard - popularized on reddit in the early days of the SRS controversy
eggbody - obviously did not coin this as this is essentially a sonic the hedgehog character, but have popularized the past tense "eggbodied" to describe a lazy kind of male physique
head-waifu - a woman who you have wifed in your head, like an imaginary friend but for a woman you'll never date

neologisms I like and think you should use but not coined by me:

- barcuck, carbcuck, famcuck, statuscuck, corpcuck et al.: mixed coinage. https://app.simplenote.com/p/ZZH1VN
- proglodyte (pejorative for progressives; José Kim coined this; "tradlodyte" is a variation for the opposite)
- brittledick (Jeremy Cahill's coinage, fun to say)
- duckduckgoosing (jeremy cahill) "the practice of causing porn to rank highly in web search engine results for obscure vocabulary items" https://fb.com/horkermon/posts/943087176101611
- jeffelon (Cahill's coinage; the inner circle of Jeff Bezos)
- noodleboned (Lanni Hammonds did this one)
- ratfinky (term for dishonorable/weasely behaviors by rationalists, coinage by jacob)
- cortisol-bodied (friend who almost certainly wants to be anonymous coined this)
- weeb nouveau: genre of pseudo-classical that primarily exists in japanese video games (coinage by jacob)
- creampie chicken (sex between husband/wife to see who breaks first in the act of childmaking; friend's coinage, will attribute if he chooses)
- shoestarer (person who, when approached with real-life confrontation, stares at their shoes. chris pinson identified this phenomenon)
- low orbit dumbass cannon (the male counterpart to dumb bitch juice; larger mcbigger coined this.)

other misc neologisms which were coined by me, but may/may-not be in use (attempting to be in chronological order, but no guarantees):

- headsanding (what it sounds like)
- ostrich (animal version of the above)
- tldrtard/tldrcel (person who has a low threshold for saying "tldr" and is hostile to longform)
- hyena (a kind of internet user who has, like, contagious yawning but for trollish LMAO replies; thinks an argument is won by number of aggregate haha reacts)
- quotemark (as in "people")
- funko socialists - nerd-hobbyists who aspire to anti-capitalist convictions -- except when those convictions interfere with their preferred video game company, favorite hobby, or impulsive purchases of weeb shit.
- dysejaculate (mistaken cum, a pejorative noun for erroneous cumshots, aka certain people)
- dick-nomad: a type of woman, usually age 21-30, who has managed to find a combination of sugaring, stripping, and/or miscellaneous sexual favors to avoid all societal pressures normal people would be subject to, but not in any way that actually fosters competence.
- alt-rationalist: rationalist thought that accepts a compatible telos but has one or more significant disagreements about the main current of thought (elaboration @ https://facebook.com/1441668545/posts/10228301146580758)
- schizoconservative / schizo-safetyism (paranoid versions of the respective ideologies)
- creating value (catchall for doing anything shitty, degen, taboo, unconscionable, or unspeakable; "brb, going to the bathroom to [create value]")
- shapecel (pejorative for "shape rotator")
- anti-slur: an otherwise banal or benign word used in lieu of a slur such that its oddity makes the brain complete it as a slur https://facebook.com/1441668545/posts/10228551376916360
- neurodivergent (anti-slur for the r-slur)
- software engineer (anti-slur for "autist")
- almost-checkmark (social media poweruser accounts who clearly see themselves as influential but lack enough tangible real-life clout to get checkmark status)
- socioposting/misanthroposting/tabooposting (the step beyond edgeposting)
- hehcore (humor that only results in muted "tsch" or "heh" smirks at best; humor that repels belly laughs. ex.: "these posts are hehcore")
- lower-highwit (obnoxiously condescending and therefore satisfying angle on "midwit")