My text to my 17-year-old grandson was this: “What is a herbenerbitz?” His immediate reply was, “A tram car.” I laughed aloud, and sent him a follow-up text, saying that I knew he would remember, and that I had forgotten.
About seven years ago, Xavion and Imani spent the last of several summer vacations with his mother’s parents in a hotel in Ocean Beach, New Jersey. The four of us would stroll the boardwalk, where the kids would lobby the “old folks” for cotton candy and other forbidden foods. One of the attractions on the sidewalk was a large tourist bus, the front of which was emblazoned with the words “Tram Car.” One day, I said to the kids, “Here comes the herbenerbitz.” Both looked at me, wonderingly, but six-year-old Imani was direct in her inquiry: “What’s a herbenerbitz?” I replied, “A tram car.” Xavion quickly picked up on the game. “What’s a tram car?” he queried. I promptly responded, “A herbenerbitz.” For the rest of our stay, the two played word badminton with me (“wordminton?”) as we batted “herbenerbitz” and “tram car” back and forth. My memories of that boardwalk summer were shaken loose by a television news story about a man’s two children trying to get a word their father coined into the dictionary.
Hillary and Jonathan Krieger grew up with “orbisculate,” a word their father used to describe the phenomenon of being squirted by fruit — such as grapefruit — after plunging your spoon into it. Hillary was in her twenties before she found out that “orbisculate,” was a word her father, Neil Krieger, had made up for a class assignment when he was a freshman at Cornell University in the late 1950s. She told a friend, “Orbisculate, you know, when fruit squirts on you.” When her friend challenged the word, she went to her dad, who sheepishly admitted that he’d made it up.
In my column “Word Guy” (The Weekly View, October 22, 2020) I wrote of how little regard I have for the words, “poop” and “pee.” I grew up having bowel movements and urinating, terms that I taught all three of my children. My eldest child and her gifts to me, the children she bore, understand those terms. And they understand the ways that I add to the interest of the words. When I asked the newly awakened Imani as she rose from her bed one morning if she had to “urinoscopize,” she sleepily responded, “Yes.” She did not question the word I used.
Neil Krieger died of complications from COVID-19 in April 2020, and his children, remembering their “upbeat and positive father,” have been working to get the word he coined accepted into the dictionary. They have managed to get it into the online halls of (the) Urban Dictionary, into a crossword puzzle, a comic strip, and engraved onto a grapefruit spoon. They market T-shirts with the word and a graphic showing “orbisculation,” with the proceeds of sales devoted to a Dallas non-profit that supports families who have suffered the loss of a loved one.
I was delighted to discover a word to describe the squirting of fruit juice into one’s eye. In my mind, it ranks up there with a word to describe someone being thrown through a window; what big brains knew that there was a word to describe that action? I find it charming that Krieger’s children are working so hard to create a memorial to him by urging that his word be accepted into the popular lexicon, and thereby, into the dictionary.
Good luck, Hillary and Jonathan; my grandchildren already have “herbenerbitz.”
cjon3acd@att.net