this is erosterous!

I said in my last post that I was fascinated by how words enter a lexicon and spread throughout a population. When I was just out of high school, I remember hearing about an impressionable young former co-worker whom moved to Tahoe to snowboard and attend the questionable Sierra Nevada College, located in Incline Village, NV. He became the president of, I believe, the venerable snowboard club. As a person who felt he needed to lead, to set standards for his fellow snowboarders attending a questionable college, he sent out an email exhorting them to use the word "solid," meaning "cool," as much as possible, and he would too. Although this word was already in use by questionable students who attended questionable colleges all over the country, he thought by pure exhortation he could cause its use to spread like a sexually transmitted disease. But that's not how these things work. People must decide on their own that a word is cool or useful enough to repeat.

For example, last weekend, I was in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, for a friend's birthday/graduation/going away party, and I was driving across town to the IHOP with two other friends: Rhodes, who already graduated from the University of Alabama and is about to enter law school, and Angel, who is about to graduate with a degree in religious studies. While these two dudes aren't pedants, they know quite a bit about religious traditions, among other things, and are capable of using big words when needed.

It was no surprise, then, that during our drive, Angel used a word I'd never heard: erosterous. (Quick disclaimer: being an American––even one who has studied English at a state college and holds two degrees––means I have a very limited vocabulary and am extra self-conscious about it.) I sat in the back seat, thinking, What the hell does "erosterous" mean? Will I remember to look it up by the time I get to a computer, or will I just forget it? A few minutes later, the word was casually dropped again, making me feel dumber, because now I'm thinking it's a common word I should know. When we were finally seated in the IHOP and looking over their extensive menu (have you seen the variety there lately?), he let it fly again: "It's completely erosterous."

I said, "You're really into that word today, huh? What does it even mean?" At that point, Rhodes and Angel began laughing and told me it's from a Swedish skit comedy series called Grotesco, which is based on using malapropisms. One of the skits spoofs a John Grisham movie, which is where "erosterous" came from (minute 2:02 of The Trial, part 2):

The funny thing about erosterous's use is that you get its meaning from the context. In the movie, the guy is using a malapropism for "preposterous." Throughout the weekend, Rhodes and Angel kept overusing the word in various ways with various meanings, and by the end of the trip, I found myself occasionally using it as well (welcome to the club, bro). Everything became erosterous or erosterously absurd.

Which reminded me of a community college paper I wrote where the instructor commented "redundant" in red pen above a certain sentence, by which he meant the entire statement was redundant. Instead of looking the word up, I inserted it in the sentence below where it sat, making the edited sentence read, "Vegetarianism has been an age old redundant argument . . ."

So I'm wondering, since most of us pick up words through television and movies and friends, and many of us want to sound intelligent (you're not wearing your hat crooked), yet are too lazy to look words up, could something like erosterous spread? As the ruler of the Kingdom of Eric, I command you to use the word erosterous as much as possible, and I will too. I'm just kidding. Don't. You'll sound like a parrot and an asshole.