Photo: Demi BrookeA few months ago, we coined a new word on this blog: “penultamour,” defined as “the last person to date another person before that other person took up with his/her eventual spouse.”
The word hasn’t exactly caught fire; but at least someone grabbed the domain name www.penultamour.com.
Now a reader named Anne Tadman Cramb writes in with a neologism of her own:
May I introduce the “flambore” [noun] — i.e., one who is flamborant, i.e., someone with a “big personality” who, in company, performs stories, and is seemingly unable to engage in reciprocal conversation with others. Flamborancy becomes more apparent on subsequent occasions, as the flambore tends to forget which stories he has told to whom!
Flambores often make the mistake of thinking others have nothing worthwhile to say and appear frightened of short pauses in conversation, so they readily go into their schtick.
Happy New Year, and may you not have the misfortune of being on the receiving end of a flambore during 2009!
I don’t know if Anne will have any more luck with “flambore” than I did with “penultamour,” but if it’s any consolation, she should at least consider that the typical flambore probably has a somewhat better-than-average chance of becoming a penultamour.
and 
. You can also watch it on 
a loss of memory seems to be the norm from time to time- information overload or the mind working tricks to avoid pain. that is one thing computers seem better at handling- though I just overloaded my computer too and it froze.
New words must serve a real purpose. Here’s my suggestion:
Billion, trillion, zillion, million, what’s in a name? I read and hear confusion of those terms on the news and in the media on a daily basis. No one corrects them. The TV guide said a 60 Minutes segment examined the state of California being $40 million in debt. I would have watched the show to see how this was possible, since $40 million comes less than $1.10 per Californian. Amazing if true, but of course, they meant billions not millions.
Often, I’ve wondered if I heard the person right. The words rhyme after all—and the really significant amounts differ by only a single phonic. And they’re just zeros anyway.
It would be an improvement if the words for increasingly large sums of money would be increasingly longer and more difficult. Then it would be clear if you meant ,for example, mere hectos (100s), kilobucks (1000s), megalomuchos (1,000,000s), gigagianticostlies (1,000,000,000), and terasuperduperultrabuckaroonies (1,000,000,000,000). Beyond this amount, people would have to pass some sort of test before being allowed to speak or write the words.
Oh, crap–I’m a flambore.
ok Eric–I get your point- the operative word is “cognitive con-sonance.”
(2003, Goldstein) Since this expression is my own and original– no use of it without the author’s permission please– and thankyou all in advance–
Why don’t we think of some useful words for our language. Because of the nature of children to ask questions I realized that we don’t have a verb for driving a boat. Think about it, when we are in our cars we’re “driving”, when we are in a plane the pilot is “flying” the plane, but what do we say about boats. We don’t say the captain is “boating”, “sailing” may be appropriate for a sail boat, but what if you’re not in a sail boat. “Steering” seems too generic. How about we think of a word for this problem.
Should it be flamboor or flambore? I think the existing definition of a boor helps the understanding of flamboor a little more, but only inasmuch as the reader knows that word.
I few year’s back, I tried to coin the term “patriobfuscate”.
“Patriobfuscate” means to hide one’s actions with patriotism. (Wrap one’s self in the flag).
http://www.openpolitics.com/2003/04/10/patriobfuscate.html
Flight! a group of singular beings flying through the air together.