From flimp to frop: The deliciously sneaky art of coining words

Flimp is not a word you meet every day, and thank god for that. Imagine being mugged by two people, one jostling your body, the other hoisting your phone and bag. Congratulations – you’ve just been flimped.

Origins unknown, flimp debuted in John Camden Hotten’s The Slang Dictionary of 1873, a colloquial bible now online. The entry reads “to hustle or rob”. Adding to the picture, Green’s Dictionary of Slang says: “to steal, esp. watches, by snatching items from their owners (rather than carefully picking a pocket), often using violent means”.

As a noun, flimp or flimper is the felon, or the jostler who diverts your focus, allowing his accomplice to fleece the goods. Which proves there are words we don’t know that identify things we know. Like philtrum, the groove below your nose, or pandiculate – to stretch and yawn at once.

From flimp to frop, a journey through words that just make sense.Credit: Jo Gay

Then again, there are things we do, and know, and feel, that go nameless. Not every tittle (the dot over an i) or aglet (shoelace end) will be tagged. Either we flimp other languages in dark laneways, stealing déjà vu and chutzpah, say, or we build our own word. That’s been the spirit of my “reverse scurryfunge” game on ABC’s Victorian Evenings in recent months.

Scurryfunge is Scottish for the panic we enter when tidying up the house as guests loom at the door. If I said guess the meaning of gogoplata (a jujitsu choke-hold) then that’s the scurryfunge game, alias the dictionary game, or Balderdash.

Reverse scurryfunge, however, is when I offer you a human moment, a familiar action, one craving to be christened. Like your current fatigue, two weeks from Christmas, which might be called exClaustion, jingle-jangled, tinsellitis, Christmalaise or Yuletiredness, according to creative listeners. While someone who shares your birthday is either a birthling, datemate, chrony, twinager or doppeldayer.

Even named things may cry out for a new name, like a better one than gastropub.

Or that miscreant hell-bent on leaving one smidge remaining in every Vegemite jar, a flake in each granola box, rather than buy a replacement? Word-makers offered jar jerk, screeper or skerricking. While the sin itself is fridgemanship.

Even named things may cry out for a new name, like a better one than gastropub. Sad to say, but that monstrous coinage conjures a loo spell rather than a cordon bleu meal. Henceforth, consider other options as cellary, grub pub, cuisinn or Munchhausen.

Then there’s that mix of expectation and mild angst as you await the next song on a shuffle stack. Neither hope nor dread, the pause can now be called audicipation, songxiety or tenterskyhooks, playing Spotluck before you hear the next opportune.

Mind you, not every anonymous thing needs naming. Since ditching X and migrating to Bluesky, I realised how the new platform lacked a label for its posts. Tweet is now taboo, of course. So what then? A Seussian litany of ideas arose, including skyte, skeet, kite, esky, bluey, bleat or bolt. Most respondents, however, insisted on post, pure and simple. Why name something if it’s already adequately named?

Fair enough, yet no dictionary I browsed could pinpoint that weird summer dance we do when our foot is jabbed by a bindi-eye. Hence, the salvation of prickle polka, bindi-hop or The Grasshopper. Just as frop (a fusion of fruit-drop) is now that action of tree-shaking to dislodge a snack, as much as flimp is to shake and steal. Because if we can’t rob other languages to seal our semantic gaps, then we’ll just have to jostle our own imaginations.