Perpetuous

Once a month, at our office, we go out for lunch to celebrate whoever happens to be having a birthday. We headed over to Boston Pizza with those one year older in February. To show them how special they are, we make them pay for their own lunch and if they’re lucky, we won’t embarrass them by singing Happy Birthday.

It’s really just another reason to go out for lunch. We’ll celebrate anything at our office. If Bob (fictitious name) comes to work with a new pair of shoes, someone is on the phone making a reservation for twelve.

So there we were, a group of highly educated people, when my colleague and friend, let’s call him Mark, mentions the word “perpetuous”, in a sentence. Everything went quiet at our end of the table. Something was off, not quite right, planets not aligned, food late, beer cold… we were thinking anything by this point. Even our good friend, we’ll call her Laura, who is known to be very knowledgeable when it comes to words, was questioning this one.

I said “Say what?”…

Now I’m not above learning new words, in fact it’s the main reason I now read on an iPad. I love to look up all those crazy words I’ve never heard before. I asked Mark to repeat the word to make sure I heard right; “Perpetuous” he said. Like a friendly Scrabble game, I had to challenge the word. No easy feat… one has to be careful when challenging Mark, he’s very smart, wins every bet.

Out comes his Android device… the table goes quiet, like waiting for a golfer to swing, while he clearly annunciates; “per – pet – u – ous”. The Google servers go completely dead for half a second trying to analyse this and out comes… nothing. We gave him a second chance, everyone knows you can’t trust those voice searches. Mark types it in but Google is too smart and knows not to trust anything coming from this particular device. The response, much faster this time, is once again… nothing.

So a new word is born and while normally the origin of words are sketchy, here it’s been documented. Being smart people, a lengthy discussion followed on the meaning of this new word. It lead us to the observations below.

Word math: perpetuous = perpetual + impetuous

• Perpetual: never ending or changing.
• Impetuous: acting or done quickly and without thought or care.
• Perpetuous: changing quickly? or never ending thoughtlessness??

Like any new word, this one is begging to be used in a sentence, but how? Feel free to comment on the definition or give some examples of how you used this new word in a sentence. Have fun with it, we certainly did.

We all know that Apple has a better audio search feature. Later in the day I picked up my iPhone to ask Siri, who knows just about everything. She defines the word this way; I’m not sure I understand.

OK, I know it’s a real word but he didn’t know that and we’re all about having fun. Don’t tell Mark.