see mj write: day 6 {whatever tickles your fancy}

i have a secret: i like to make up words.

really. completely new, thought-up-by-me words. and then i like to use them in every day conversation. most have never caught on and people just stare at me when i try, but there's one i'm considering for entry into merriam-webster's latest edition.

it's become a household word in our family. my mom uses it and all of my siblings use it. ryan even uses it occasionally. i say it all the time. i might have even used it here in cyberspace without realizing it. so as to not leave you in the dark wondering, "what in the world did maren just say?" i thought i'd let you in on it:

alagonchy.

"what does it mean?" you ask. to answer that question, we're going to have to travel back in time to my sophomore health class in high school.

the year is 1997. it was a new school year. a new school, for that matter. i remember wondering who would be in all of my classes and what teachers i would have. as i've mentioned before, i was {kind of} a nerd in high school. i worried about getting to class on time and got sick to my stomach if an assignment was returned with anything less than the first letter of the alphabet scrawled across the top. teachers liked me. well, most teachers liked me.

deb. did. not.

i'm not sure what i ever did to deb to make her not like me, but whatever it was, you could just tell i wasn't on her good side. and, of all teachers, i landed in her sophomore year health class. i wasn't about to let it get me down. i had a few friends in the class with me and we sat together in the back corner. we weren't extremely disruptive, but we were known to chat and have a good time.

one day, deb was at the chalkboard and, as a class, we were discussing emotions. you know, happy, sad, afraid, excited. as each emotion was introduced, deb asked for synonyms. happy: cheerful, glad, delighted, merry, joyful, and on and on. sad: down, gloomy, dismal, forlorn, glum, low, melancholy, etc., etc. scared: afraid, um, um, um...silence.

for some reason, the classroom full of 15 and 16 year olds couldn't think of what deb thought was an adequate amount of synonyms for scared. that's when whitney and i decided to make one up. deb wasn't going to let it go, so we strung together a few sounds and came up with alagonchy. al. a. gon. chy.

we raised our hands and gave her our answer.

"oh." said deb. "i've heard that before. what does it mean?"

"uh, scared of afraid" i replied. {isn't that what we were synonym-ing???}

"right." she replied. "i've heard of that. nice word!"

it was at that point whitney and i got a little nervous. was it really a word? did it mean something we weren't aware of? if deb had heard the word before, it had to mean something. she was a high school teacher, after all. so i went home and checked my trusty copy of webster's dictionary. nothing. i even tried to spell it a few different ways. nada. zilch. zippo.

deb was such a liar! she didn't want to admit she didn't know the meaning of a word one of her students "knew" about, so she feigned an increase in her own knowledge to make it look like she knew what we were talking about. only, we didn't even know what we were talking about!

this, obviously, was quite entertaining to me and whitney...and we decided we would use alagonchy in health class for the remainder of the semester. we'd fit it in wherever we could. guys, i'm not a trouble maker, but this gave me such a thrill. it was hilarious to watch deb's mind reel each time we used it.

for example:

maren and/or whitney: "deb, i'm a little alagonchy for the midterm exam next week. do you think we could have a class review today?"
deb: "alagonchy. what does that mean again?"
maren and/or whitney: "oh, sorry. it means scared or afraid."
deb: "oh, right. of course we can review today."

and so on and so on.

alagonchy became so commonplace for us that some of our friends and family members started to adopt it too. every so often, i check online to see if it's a publicly accepted word, and sadly, it's popularity hasn't reached mr. webster. but i'll keep checking. one day, i'm going to see something other than this when i search online:

next to the phonetic spelling, you'll see "scared or afraid." and you'll know you read it here first.