"Floordrobe."

You know:

A form of storage for clothing which requires no hangers, drawers, doors or effort. Simply drop on the floor and you have a floordrobe.

We have a very stylish colonial-style his and hers walk-on floordrobe at home.

Don't you love the Urban Dictionary?

The other day, I was reading a blog, and I ran across the word "doink." A long time ago -- and I mean in the 1970s -- I made it a personal rule to look up words I don't know in the dictionary. The only reason I adopted this rule was that I was sick of not knowing a word, not bothering to look it up, and then seeing it again. I found that very annoying. If I still didn't bother looking it up, I'd invariably see it again. It was eerie the way a word I had no memory of seeing before would turn up a second time within a day or so. If such eerie things were going to happen, I at least wanted to be prepared. Best to look up the word now.

Admittedly, there are words that you can look up, even look up repeatedly, and still not know the next time you run into it. Like, the other day, in a social situation, somebody used the word "recondite" in conversation. I know what you're thinking: Althouse, you are getting yourself into the wrong social situations.

But, so, anyway, I looked up "doink" in the Urban Dictionary. It seems to be one of those all-purpose slang words that mean what all slang words seem to mean: a stupid person/sexual intercourse/a sound effect. I didn't feel particularly enlightened, but it did set me to looking up how many slang words ended in "oink." It turns out there's one for almost every letter of the alphabet.

The most popular one seems to be "yoink": "An exclamation that, when uttered in conjunction with taking an object, immediately transfers ownership from the original owner to the person using the word regardless of previous property rights."

There's an "oink" word that I remember from childhood, but it is not shown in the Urban Dictionary as having the meaning we used for it, so I'm not going to tell you which one it was or what it meant to us. Things from childhood are so embarrassing.

When I look up a word in the dictionary, I think of my grandfather, my mother's father, Howard Beatty. Here's the picture I have of him, framed, hanging just above the stand where I keep my big, unabridged dictionary.



He was an editor at the Ann Arbor News. And that's what he's doing in this picture: editing the Ann Arbor News. It must be some time in the 1930s or 40s. One thing about Grandpa Beatty was: He liked to read the dictionary.

He also had a superpower: the ability to open up any book and find a typo. There's no slang word for that, as far as I know.

But maybe that's why you ought to want to read dictionaries -- including the Urban Dictionary. It's one thing to look up words you run across. But there are some words you're not hearing or seeing, that are just waiting to be activated by somebody like you. Some lexophile.