Are you having a nice fakeation? Lucy Mangan takes on your new word submissions

“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone”, reckoned Blaise Pascal when he was composing his Pensees. Alas, he was doing so in the mid-seventeenth century and didn’t know the half of it. D’you know what a “fakeation” is Blaise, mon ami? It’s a pretend vacation which you construct mainly via selfies against likely looking backgrounds – the sand on a building site, perhaps, or a decorative patch of vomit on a Friday night high street masquerading for the nonce as Faliraki – in order to fool anyone who gives a toss. So it’s a bit like staying in your own room but giving yourself and others all the bother of pretending you’re not, d’you see? There’s also “stay-fari” – which means holidaying in your own country but in an outdoorsy, adventurey way. Which is to take your principle, twist it into something far worse and then betray that too. You’re better off dead at 39 of tuberculosis and/or stomach cancer than living to see this day, is all I’m saying. But thank you to Tommy for submitting them both. It is always best to be aware of the perils all around.

Speaking of perils – let us examine dcornwall84’s contributions while we still can; “creashy” meaning “greasy”, usually when referring to hair, skin and probably anything else particularly disgusting and corporeal you can think of, and “chanking” meaning “very cold”. They are both players on the rich and ribald stage that is the Scottish vernacular and if the ayes have it on Thursday we may have to pay some kind of royalty (proudconfidentrepublity?) if we leave them til next week.

Let’s build in a safety margin and give a shout out to jserembe’s “gallubrious” – “devilish and harmful in nature” – too because although I can’t discover anything at all about its etymology (maybe it sprang forth fully formed from jserembe’s fertile mind) it has a distinctly Caledonian ring to it and unclaimed but likely semantic territories may be the next thing to which acquisitive Pictish eyes turn.

Daved Waschman’s “nubivagant” is one of those delightful words whose meaning is as lovely as the word itself – it means wandering or passing through clouds. Early morning nubivagant swallows. Nubivagant Spitfires flying back to Blighty. Nubivagant visions at the annual Bristol Balloon Fiesta – which I once attended and can thoroughly recommend as the trippiest sight you’ll ever enjoy without actually partaking of hallucinogens. It’s people standing next to giant Bunsen burners in wicker baskets and flying off under gently undulating silken orbs. It’s MENTAL.

And a final thank you and – if I may – a small pat of reassurance to adymiles who, as the GCSE and A-level results came in sent us “failer” (“one who repeatedly fails”) and “refail” (“to fail again”). We hope it all turned out better than you expected. If you were contributing after the fact, we hope you’ve managed to lick your wounds, gird your loins and prepare yourself for retakes. Good luck, and try to remember that it’ll be a chanking day in hell before anyone cares what you got five years from now. Don’t let them grind you down.