Friday, May 31, 2013

Coinage!

When this sort of thing happens I feel like a guy who's found a hundred dollar bill on the sidewalk. I used to be a lazy speller. Reading a tweet by Teju Cole that used the word "impoverished", a series of old misspellings occurred to me: empoverished, empowerished...and then it hit me. Somebody's got to coin "empowerished" as a concept in its own right. So I googled it, and it seems pretty clear that only ever appears as a misspelling of "impoverished". It's mine!

(Now I'm looking around to make sure there's no one around who's obviously just lost a hundred bucks out of their pocket.)

empowerish v.tr. 1 empower at. 2 exhaust through incessant appeals to cultural entitlement of.

empowerishment the state of having been empowerished, i.e., of having been exhausted by someone else's insistence that one has or ought to have powers one does not have and will not likely ever have or does not want.

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