McMansion et al.

[Laurence Horn]

quoth Jesse Sheidlower:
>On Wed, Dec 10, 2003 at 08:34:34AM -0800, David Colburn wrote:
>>
>>  And it's been around long enough to make it into the Shorter OED, defined as
>>  "a modern house built on a large and imposing scale, but regarded as
>>  ostentatious and lacking in architectural integrity."
>
>And the Longer OED, with the same definition.
>
Nice retronym!

A couple of slightly newer WOTY candidates:  a single page of a novel
(Lawrence Block's _Small Town_, 2003, p. 78, contains the following
items:

pigeon-fucker
sponsee
Lesbian Bed Death
cruisier [comparative adjective]

--of these, only the first appears to be truly new, assuming it
wasn't invented by Block.  The others clearly weren't.  _sponsee_
(see below) has 2,270 google hits and 14 "major papers" Nexis hits,
typically primed by _sponsor_, and has been around at least since
1987; Safire mentioned it in a column in 1991.  _Lesbian Bed Death_
has 201,000 [!] google hits and 9 Nexis hits dating back to 1995.  As
for _cruisier_ ([re Christopher St. in Greenwich Village:] "at this
hour on this nice a day it would be a little bit cruisier than he
could stand"), it was a bit hard to pin down because of all the false
hits ("Toyota Land Cruisiers" seem to be especially hot items), but I
did find one from an article on Provincetown ("it was cruisier than
other bars in town"), and of course it involves productive
morphology, which makes the "new"ness somewhat arbitrary.   What of
_pigeon-fucker_, you ask?  Well, here's the context, and the only
occurrence of this form that I could locate (yes, there were 11
google hits but all seem to involve the compositional meaning alluded
to in the parenthetical from the text below, not the idiomatic sense
defined just above):
==========
"The conventional wisdom in AA was that one ought to choose a sponsor
of one's own sex, to keep sexual tension from undermining the
relationship. That was fine for straights, but it wasn't that simple
in gay AA, where the term _pigeon-fucker_ had been coined to label
sponsors who took sexual advantage of sponsees. (He'd heard the term
at his first meeting, and thought it was some kinky practice he'd
somehow missed out on.)"
===========

Maybe not the sort of technical term whose merits we want to evaluate
in Boston, but there it is.  Suitable, perhaps, for Jesse's
catalogue, if nothing else.

larry