If you have ever had that little place between your shoulder blades begin to itch and just cannot contort into the right position to scratch it, then you are experiencing “acnestis.” Some of us solve it by rubbing against a post, a corner, a tree, something to help alleviate the itch.
There are also times when you just cannot find the right thing to use, so you might turn to your spouse and say, “How about scratch my back, I have a place that is itching, and it is driving me crazy.” If your spouse responds by helping then he or she is allogrooming, another great word. Monkeys and other animals do this when they practice mutually beneficial grooming. But allogrooming can also apply to just responding to the itch request.
Dogs, horses, bears, and other animals scratch that itch when they roll around on the ground like the horse above.
The things that can make it into our vocabulary these days never cease to amaze me. Textpectation falls into the category of slang but seems to be noodling its way toward acceptance.
Textpectation is the anxiety one feels while waiting on a response to one of your text messages. This is obviously a new word (non-word, slang) that arose from our obsession with texting.
“John felt significant textpectation waiting on a response on his text to Jill.”
“Sally experienced significant textpectation while waiting on John to text her.”
To make matters worse, textpectation actually passed the test in Microsoft Word while composing this article.
