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

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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.

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?