Is there a word for...?

Lothario - Good possibility, but it really seems to apply more to a Casanova type ... a man who specializes in seduction, with no implication of his being married.

I don't know why this is bugging me so.

(could you give an example of the female equivalent? I can only find words that are way too vague ("slut") and not specifically about cheating on their husband) (yes, I'm using ILX to learn useful English, just like most non-English speakers here, I think. That's why I'm asking for an example)

Is it pronounced cockholder?

[peculiar bump, perhaps, but] i'm pretty sure there's a word that plays the role for women in relation to men that 'uppity' plays for black people in relation to white people (i.e. a code-word for a subordinate speaking out of turn to the master), but i can't think what it is. anyone?

Some candidates: aggressive, abrasive, ambitious, outspoken, pushy. More to follow, once others chime in.

i got hit, and rightly so, for using 'strident' when fighting with suy a few month back.

suzy, that is

'ambitious' and 'strident' (soz darragh) definitely play part of what i'm thinking, although only part. maybe it's more nuanced than the potentially blanket use of 'uppity'.

no need for soz at all, it was a terrible choice of word- for all that i was, as is usual when arguing with suzy, sorely pressed.

"Shrill" is often deployed in these cases.

wilful?

hot damn, yeah. i really hope i didnt use that too tbh. (xp)

'wilful' too general a word for this, imo?

coquettish?

"shrill" will get the juices flowing propoerly every time.

Feisty?

^^^good one

Spunky

w/ added connotation of needing 2 possess masculine essence 2 compete w/ men

there is a word for this and i have forgotten it

it is to 'evil' as 'velleity' is to 'volition'....something like 'the lowest category of evil'

As in the least evil or the most evil?

the least obviously.....the de minimis level of sin

peccadillo?

the latins seem to have the market cornered on this don't they

perhaps we can anglicize to "sinlet"

Mischievous?

There should be a word that means 'stuff that you are like 90% sure you're going to get rid of but don't have time to deliberate about because there's a deadline for this move so you just pack it in boxes so you can deal with it at the new place except that it's clearly pretty low priority by the time you get to the new place and have to unpack actual important stuff so it winds up just sitting in boxes for months or maybe even years even though it's basically garbage'.

Is there a word for the phenomenon of deflection by exaggeration? Sort of a defensive strawman tactic? E.g. one partner says to the other "You've really been hurting me the way you're talking to me lately," and the other one says "Oh, so I'm the worst person in the world! I'm a complete monster!" *

*question has nothing to with my relationship, don't worry

hyperblowme

ad flopinem (us)
ad divenem (uk)

Maybe the word you may want is cacaphemism.

The opposite of euphemism, a cacaphemism is something that sounds exaggeratedly bad, far worse than it really is, as a means of seeming humble or deflecting praise. The usual examples are "jalopy" (or "bucket of bolts") to refer to a completely normal car, and "ball and chain" to refer to one's beloved wife. Or you might refer to one's palatial home as a shack or cottage.

But in the situation you describe, it's a rhetorical tactic where you go WAY beyond where the other person is, to manipulate them into making a defensive rhetorical retreat, which you can claim as a victory. "You stepped on my foot." "Oh, so now I'm Hitler?" "No, I never said that you're Hitler, just that you stepped on my foot."

"I look like a whale in this dress!" "No, sweetie, you look lovely! Svelte, even!"

Cheap, transparent, manipulative, sometimes effective.

that is a useful word

I was looking up logical fallacies and didn't find the one I wanted but the "Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy" is a good one I wasn't already familiar with, so good job everyone!

I'm going to stick with ad flopinem, I'm pretty happy with myself for that one

What do you call a responsive utterance that follows a person or deity's name? Like "blessed be his name" or "may he rest in peace"?

it's a type of honorific

venerating phrases?

crawling

xp, yeah the word "honorific" popped into my mind but then when I looked up honorific the definitions seemed wrong. So I guess "honorific" it is.

honorific is pretty fitting

is there a word for the retrospective alarm you feel when you've been working near something extremely precious and fragile without realising it was precious or fragile, and while no harm has been done or come close to being done, you are now imagining what could so easily have occurred

(in this case a small ceramic flower of my sister's which i just assumed was a slightly weird looking wild flower -- actual real flowers can be touched or knocked without damage, so i was really not taking due care)

is there a word for... when an original piece of art or media invalidates itself, simply through its own influence? I'm thinking about how films like The Matrix and Reservoir Dogs, hugely revered films in their times, now feel relatively unremarkable, tame and 'of their time', mostly because they went on to spawn and influence so many other films that would use these as a jumping-off point.

Period piece? Aged poorly?

shite?

(lol i reread my post of sept 29, 2017, and got the same nameless feeling all over again)

yes, aged poorly is fine but lots of things age poorly because they were naff or bandwagon-jumping at the time. Here I'm specifically referring to things that felt revelatory at the time, received a lot of praise and popularity, but went on to influence so many things that would come after that in retrospect it's harder to see what was so special about it in the first place, or at least it feels like a lamer version of what came after, even though what came after wouldn't have existed without it. Similarly, this piece of art/media has been so absorbed into the vernacular of its time that the tropes have since become standardised.

self-dated

i mean i just made that up but it would kind of work

It's a common enough phenomena that there should be a word (see also: The French Connection, Halloween). I'd propose 'skeletonized'. Picked clean of novelty by derivative piranha.

it really does happen all the time, especially in film and often in music. 'aged poorly' is fine, but doesn't quite summarise it. saying Reservoir Dogs has 'aged poorly' sounds like its doing a disservice, as though Tarantino should have tried harder to make it timeless or something, but in reality the film was remarkable for the action genre at the time because it felt fresh and original and employed a hip 70s soundtrack and had a non-linear timeline and casual dialogue -> all tropes that would become pretty-much standard as the nineties wore on.

bad movies are just bad movies imo, not that there is anything wrong with watching bad movies, I dig loads of them! But this idea that the newness of a bad movie adds some lustre is maybe influenced by how jaded, cynical or bright eyed + enthusiastic the viewer might be, maybe?

something like obsoleted might be the closest word in sense but agree there ought to be a term for this

I was thinking about how 'dated' (perhaps even quaint) Reservoir Dogs felt nowadays when I saw a close-up shot of someone graphically cutting another person's ear off on the NBC series Hannibal.

calzino, this isn't about subjectivity. plenty of people don't think of these films as 'bad movies' even today, and plenty more LOVED them at the time

normalization, no?

(lol i reread my post of sept 29, 2017, and got the same nameless feeling all over again)

in the "pop will eat itself" sense, "autophagous" is an actually existing word

fugacious ?

adjective
1.
fleeting; transitory:
a sensational story with but a fugacious claim on the public's attention.
2.
Botany. falling or fading early.

fugacious doesn't really speak to how the given film's (or whatever's) success has generated its change in fortune

(and the problem with words that begin "auto" is it now suggests something more like "technologically self-sufficient" than just being a prefix meaning "self-")

matrixcide

paedophagous means child-eating: we want something like "eaten by its children" but my classical greek is not up to that level of subtlety

'self-immolating trailblazer'

https://i0.wp.com/gifrific.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Lamp-Spin-Fail.gif?ssl=1

my Ancient Greek guess would be paedophagomenic

or -ous rather than -ic, idk

catchy AND exact

I've seen this sort of thing called the "Seinfeld effect", maybe not applicable to films but it's the same thing

Just call them "velvet spiders"

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SeinfeldIsUnfunny - almost

the correct comedy opinion is that if it stands the test of time it was never actually funny in the first place

glad someone noticed.

Every so often, I'll dip into one of the Sesame Street Old School sets and see a clip that I haven't seen since my age was in the low single digits but which I remember with great clarity, and the effect is jarring, as if I've been suddenly sent hurtling back through decades into some younger iteration of myself and the time which has elapsed since never happened. It's the nearest thing to time travel I ever expect to experience. I think some dude named Proust had a similar experience with a madeline? Is there a name for this.

memory

Aimless ilu but I know u can do better than that, my dude.

retrogression?

I get this a whole lot less often than I do now, owing to neurological entropy or whatever. But it used to be very important to me, that "taken right back" moment, and I searched in vain for literature about it when I studied psychology at university. Nostalgia was the word I attached to it before slowly realising that for most people that referred to a more deliberative, less intense experience.

variously referred to as 'madeleine moments', 'proustian rushes', 'cued recall' and some ppl call them involuntary memories

Is there a term for the practice of alphabetizing under "T" bands whose names start with "The"?

definitive articulation

I'm wondering if there's a word or phrase for when a person lies to save face and the other person knowingly accepts the lie because there's no point in further conflict.

I had somewhat pricy tickets to a concert that got postponed, and the venue didn't notify me about the postponement or process a refund -- had I not checked myself I would have just showed up. I was somewhat miffed because this was a concert for my birthday. I left voicemail for the venue and got no response. I emailed. I left a bad google review. Finally I got an email saying a refund had been processed, and then a call claiming the venue had sent me multiple emails and to "check my spam folder." I could 100% tell they were full of shit, and I absolutely did not get any prior emails (whereas I clearly did get an email once I got the refund). Yet, I just pretended like that was probably what happened -- I had gotten my refund and they even offered me a free show to make up for it, so what was the point of continuing to argue? I accepted the lie.

I think that would fall under the umbrella concept of "social construction(ism)" though I don't know a name for that specific type of interaction. The sociologist Erving Goffman wrote about this a lot. The example I remember a professor using when discussing Goffman's ideas was, back in the days when a couple were supposed to be married when they shared a room in a hotel, an unmarried couple would lie to the desk clerk and check in as a married couple, while the desk clerk - knowing this was a lie - would go along with it so that the hotel wouldn't lose the business.

yeah that sounds right. Maybe "save face" itself covers a lot of it, it's just the two-way participation in saving face that makes it specific.

Also the fact that here it was part of accepting an apology. Because there was just no situation where I could expect the venue to say "we fucked up and didn't bother to tell you, we don't have our shit together," and it wouldn't have really mattered to me if they had since they made it right.

Appeasement?

"shared fiction" kind of gets at it, but maybe still not specific enough

Possibly something like a 'shared politeness strategy'....There's probably a Malcolm Gladwell article in it (showing how it will inevitably lead to the next Great Depression or economic collapse).

This reminds me a bit of how we sign things that no once reads and in fact were they to read would totally disrupt things by holding up queues in car rental offices acts so on.

On being admitted to hospital recently, I actually got asked to do a set of electronic stylus signatures saying that I agreed to certain disclaimers and codes of conduct without even being shown them. I decided to make a point of asking to actually see the thing I was signing and got a some raised eyebrows before she went off to print them out obviously thinking “who is this piece of work?” As I spent my two minutes speed-reading them, and decided I probably wouldn’t break the unspoken agreement next time.

“Going along with the charade” maybe?

"what is the truth, but a lie agreed upon" fucksake what has my life come to that i'm quoting fucken Nietzsche on the internet

Calling someone's bluff?

Benefit of the doubt?

I feel like there has to be a word for this: it's a certain kind of nihilistic credulity, or nihilism carried to the extreme of almost arbitrarily choosing to believe in something. I feel like you see this in a lot of alt right stuff, maybe also in the crypto/NFT world, the gamestop craze, tungsten cubes, where it's almost like nihilistic suspension of disbelief, like a nihilistic choice to let go completely and just allow oneself to get caught up in something.

"fuck it"

mark xp

“yolo”

I think there should be a word (if there isn't) for something that's addictive but pleasureless, like a blank addiction. Thinking in particular of all the reels/tiktok type content I get stuck watching where there's no payoff whatsoever, it's not really funny or interesting or exciting or even cringey, but the mere fact of there being endless amounts of it leads me to get stuck watching/swiping through.

I think there's a Chinese or Japanese term for that, but I can't remember it, but I'm pretty sure I heard of it during the quarantine because it's the hope of extracting pleasure out of something as a way to fight against the dreariness of existence.

Ah ha! https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20201123-the-psychology-behind-revenge-bedtime-procrastination

compulsion?

It's a while since I've looked at it, but Paul Virilio has an interesting concept for these kinds of states: picnolepsy or picnoleptic states, wherein the 'user' experiences lapses in time and absences of consciousness. Virilio puts this down to the 'speed' of modernity but my understanding of the concept is very much bound up in technology and states brought on by prolonged exposure to the internet. Virilio posits a kind of mourning associated with it, wherein the cost of these blanknesses is an un/subconscious understanding of life passing away.

The term is semantically linked to epilepsy, as in the 'little death' of epilepsy becomes the 'tiny death' of picnolepsy.

If we're coming up with fancy names for "killing time", howzabout "chronocide"? ...might sound too metal though...

Indeed!

https://open.spotify.com/track/3L23tVt7iYTBdRst43um7G?si=k2Vsqni8QuiYN8LcqrAaog

i think you're being dishonest with yourself if you don't think you're getting any pleasure out of watching endless reels tbh.

lol I know it means something else but I’m imagining someone compulsively watching hours of Scottish folk dancing

now i am and it's a much better image to be real haha

Also something that eats time = chronophage.

my imagination leads to some combination of picnics and orgasm

The particular kind of ennui that sets in when you are surrounded by people enjoying something and you find yourself unable to enjoy and even bothered by the same thing.

Sounds kind of adjacent to ressentiment.

Superbowl Sennui

Alienation / detachment or disdain / contempt depending on the strength of the feeling ?
Or just boredom

or indifference

My daughter coined the useful word "ignorative" to describe someone who's ignoring someone else. Is there another word for this?

I'd say I've blacklisted them

Thanks, but I'm looking for an adjective to describe the behaviour of the person who's doing the ignoring. And I should have said, this is kind of domestic, i.e. when someone says something and the other person doesn't respond.

Deaf.

I know "ignorant" is too confusing to use in anagram's situation, but I stupidly only realized recently how "ignorant" is related to "ignore"

disregardful

i'm blindspotting them?

it's a form of passive-aggressive behaviour innit. Ghosting or something.

Blanking is the word I've always used

Coventry-sending

is there a word, a phrase, or a phenomenon descriptor beyond "forgetful" to describe what I like to refer to as "mentally reverting to factory settings"?

This isn't merely forgetting something, this is getting something wrong, being corrected on it, fixing the behavior temporarily, even for a few days, then very abruptly going back to getting the thing wrong again and having no real recollection that you've corrected them on it before. Where something is so seared into your brain that you have no ability to correct it no matter how often

Examples:

-My best friend keeps insisting Philip Bailey of Earth Wind and Fire is dead. he's been saying this for 7 years. It was Maurice White he's thinking of. Every time he brings it up, I say "No, man, Philip Bailey isn't the one that died, it's Maurice - Philip's still around", and he'll go "oh, wow, dude, that's nuts. I completely thought it was Philip! wow!". few months pass, and EWF will come up, and he'll repeat it again, seeming to have no memory that we've argued about this before.

-I'm subscribed to Katelyn Jetelina's substack. I misremembered her last name as Jeselnik once. I correct myself on it all of the time, and when I'm trying to Google her, keep typing Katelyn Jeselnik. no matter how many times it feels like I finally got it right.

-There was this actress once who kept butchering a joke during The Mystery of Edwin Drood. She was playing Princess Puffer, propietor of an opium den, and she's supposed to be talking to randos in the audience, and at one point she's supposed to call on a young man and insinuate she had sex with him and said "You haven't had better since, right?". Then after he says "no", she's meant to deadpan "he hasn't had ANY since!", roaring laughter.

She kept saying "I'm the best you've had since, right?", and when the audience member would look confused because that doesn't make any sense, she'd deadpan "I'm the only he's had since". the director, during notes, spent about five minutes on that one note each time, pointing out they'd gone over it before, making her say it the right way. she'd get it right, and then next rehearsal, back to the wrong one. never got it right once during the show. Director kept saying "it's remarkable - it's like there's no ability to fix it. She's making the effort but we must have missed our window to fix it."

There's the French term idée fixe, though this is usually used to describe an actual obsession.

Sometimes I'll find a piece of media - usually, a movie or tv show - and think it's so great that I need to share it with a friend or loved one. So I'll invite them to watch it with me, but since it's my second viewing, I'm not as interested as I was the first time. I may feel a little bored, and start to come up with small reasons why the show isn't as good as I initially thought. At the same time, I get super anxious that my friend is also finding these same faults with the art. Please laugh, gasp, cheer...something!

Anyway, it happens to me often enough that I wish there was a word for this particular combination of boredom and anxiety.

anticippointment

there's a cartoon for that (the anxiety anyway): https://www.tumblr.com/imoquest/115344065924/eternal-torture

excellent

There should be a word for the maximum amount of hope you can have for something before its shortcomings in comparison to that likely unrealistic expectation turns your experience into a net negative, especially in the context of drugs or supplements where placebo effects can be just as or more powerful than the intrinsic effects of the drugs themselves.

I am perhaps unrealistically hoping this word already exists and is German

If I understand you correctly, a case where initial optimism is counterbalanced by evidence and brings you straight to defeatism / despair ? Or more like being undecided and weighing the pros and cons / moderating your expectations ?
If you lean negative, it sounds like pessimism / fatalism / doubt / cynicism. If positive, for example you're banking on a placebo effect, is like saying "come what may" and mustering confidence, almost like a leap of faith, I'm sure there's a word for that attitude.
Sorry if off-track.

Sort of both, but I had this idea that there was a quantifiable optimum amount of optimism that gives the best outcome that embodies all those considerations, and this point is actually beyond that optimum. Like you're probably already in sucker territory, but you're still coming out ahead.

It would probably be two related words, but I was thinking the act of rapidly pushing a button to make the walk sign cycle through faster when it would do no such thing as a kind of superstitious ritual would be one word, but when designers see this behavior and actually make the walk sign come on faster in some cases as a kind of manifesting would be the sequel to this word.

I will do that, but not in the belief that the light will change more rapidly as a result. It's more that I want to make doubly certain the button registered my presence.

There should be a third (fourth?) related word for the button being decorative and the lights being on a fixed timer behind the scenes.
Placebo-tton?

I like the idea of them all being magic-related words though.

Very apropos to our times but is there a word for something with the properties of a secret conspiracy, but the part that makes it secret is it is so naked and corrupt and stupid that few people believe you when you say you will do the thing you're doing.

Not exactly hiding in plain sight, more like hiding in plain ridiculousness?

Conspicuous corruption?
Egregious evil?

I like conspicuous corruption! But I feel like that's more the pattern of behavior or lifestyle, the reveling in it bit.

I was thinking about how the character of Howard in Better Call Saul is introduced as a depthless grinning nepo baby but is revealed as a more sympathetic (maybe even the most!) character throughout the series -- is there a word for this kind of nepo baby?

Like an opposite of a Chet Hanks?

Someone who is preoccupied/meticulous with their personal appearance but also deeply caring about others = a nice-issist?