That Blue Twitter Bird Works Blue, Too.

This post is dedicated to the memory of William Safire, whose “On Language” column confounded and entertained me.

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Last week, I roamed New York City, looking for a bookstore. I had a presentation to finish and needed coffee, free wi-fi and a replacement for the book I left on the plane.

I didn’t find a book store. Part of the reason may have been that, as I walked down Avenue of the Americas, I did what most people do and kept one eye on my iPhone, scrolling through a stream of tweets.

A word gobsmacked me. Fucktarded.

NPR ran a recent story about how calling someone “retarded”, a common playground taunt when I was in grade school, has fallen out of fashion. They did not debate whether you can still call someone fucking retarded, even in an abbreviated fashion. But I think we can agree it’s exponentially worse.

Such is language. We change how we speak and write as our thinking evolves. Or we at least fake it and stop saying such things in public when we notice that most people around us don’t say such things any more. And when someone does, there is more wincing than laughter.

But how we communicate has just as much an influence on how we speak. We narrate our lives in 140 characters. Novels are written and read on cell phones. So we’ll keep bending and cramming the language to say more with less. How many acronyms and word mash-ups have you seen become common expressions over the past five years?

A college memory, from Sociology 101. My teacher, who I have long forgotten, taught us the lovely chestnut about how Eskimos have 37 different words for snow. One for wet snow. Another for the dry powder that hurts your skin. One for the kind that melts in your ear when some jerk hits you in the head with a snowball.

Whether it’s true or not, I love the insight. That we use language to label and explain our surroundings. And there is room for invention to provide us with more precision, to say exactly what we mean. (No easy task, no matter how many words you have at your disposal.)

So, interwebs, in that spirit, I offer to my readers, all twelve of you, a new word. Feel free to pepper it in your tweets and status updates.

The word: ridicilicious. Used to describe that incredible combination of ridiculousness and deliciousness, usually in reference to entertainment. As in: This week’s One Tree Hill was ridicilicious.