Birth of a Valindrome

I find it ironic that I edit an online news site when I was such a poor student of English/Communication Arts or whatever they were calling the study of nouns, verbs and adjectives in the late seventies/early eighties. Granted, I did well in composition and aced spelling long before we were handicapped by the aid of computer spell checkers, but the actual technical aspect of sentence construction - much like algebra - was more than my patience could stand.

So here I am at the age of 40+ spending my days (and nights, and sometimes weekends) poring over the press releases of hundreds of authors all across the country and various parts of the world, checking them for spelling and grammatical errors, the latter of which are harder to find because while spell checkers are pretty good, grammar checkers are yet to be perfected. I do not do line-by-line thorough checks, but rather glance through for anything that stands out, like a misplaced apostrophe or multiple punctuation marks... My main focus is on getting the headline and the lead-in correct so that our site looks nice and feeds don't look like they were written by preschoolers.

Surely I digress.

This post is really not about grammar or spelling or punctuation but more about my love of words in general. No, I'm not one for giving speeches, but I do love to read and I dabble in writing and I just happen to love the way words fill a page when done in a catchy way that holds the reader's attention. That leads me to a little thing I like to call a valindrome, the topic of this post.

Now, I don't know the first thing about word construction and origin, like the Latin meaning for this or the Greek root of that or prefixes and suffixes and such, so I highly doubt that my description of the word valindrome is going to be spot on correct to those who study such things, but when you read on, I believe that you will find that it is likely a very fitting definition.

The word valindrome is a combination of my name and the word palindrome, which is a word that is the same forward or backword, like "wow" or "madam" or, appropriately to my profession, "racecar." What is a valindrome? It is a word that is created by combining two existing words to make a new one. Hence the word valindrome itself being an example of the word valindrome. (Val+palindrome = valindrome, get it?)

Now that you know what a valindrome is, I would like to share a few of them with you here, and as more are created, I will add them to the list, so check back if you are interested.

The original valindrome, which I have not yet verified was created by myself or my daughter, is the word "Mandol" which is an imaginary product whose name was created by combining the word "man" with the existing trademarked product, "Midol." We use it often when discussing the men in our household when they are disagreeable, cranky, moody or otherwise hard to live with. It is our way of saying that they are hormonal and could use a dose of the imaginary drug if there one on the market. We have been known to send urgent texts with the words "Mandol: Jumbo package!" when warning each other of impending meetings with such afflicted men. I would imagine this product to work much like Midol is supposed to work for women, and I would suggest that instead of taking it with a bar of chocolate or a box of wine, they down it with a beer and some pork rinds, although those pork rinds might cause them to retain water and cause more bloating than the Mandol can fix.

And so was born the valindrome.

Next on our list is a one of my favorites, and it has actually become the name of my other blog, "Throttleshock." The definition of throttleshock is: "The adrenaline rush one experiences as an engine acheives maximum power, propelling car and driver into a frenzy of speed and movement." It's the feeling I get when standing just a few feet from the edge of a race track when the engines rev and the cars fly by and the scents and sounds of a night of racing fill the air. There is no other feeling like throttleshock. I got the idea from the movie Bottle Shock when I was brainstorming over the name of a racing e-newsletter. It would still be good for that, but right now I will keep it as my blog title, and maybe some day use the domain names I have registered for something really fun.

The last valindrome for today is "badgitude," which is a combination of badge and attitude. It originated on the parking lot of the University of Dayton when a guy who is most likely a postal worker by day, was given a badge and told to harass parking lot patrons on the weekends. The definition of badgitude is "the mindset of any civillian who is not a police officer by trade, but is designated as a security worker only for a specific event."

Those are the first three valindromes, but I have a few more already written down and defined, and I have no doubt that more will pop out at unexpectd moments.