WORD SPY

I’m reading a fun book called Word Spy: The Word Lover’s Guide to Modern Culture, by Paul McFedries (there is also a website here), and one of the new terms I learned is highly applicable to me:

A kind of temporal New Math comes into play: “If I sleep six hours a night during the week instead of eight, that’s an extra ten hours a week! Nothing will stop me then, bwah ha ha ha!” We become a new kind of creature: sleep camel n. (1999) A person who gets little sleep during the week and then attempts to make up for it by sleeping in and napping on the weekend. Silicon Valley refers to the pressured people who store up enough sleep on weekends to manage a 60-hour-plus week as sleep camels. The term brings to mind beasts of burden, expendables expected to die beneath you in pursuit of some higher purpose. (Business Day, July 11, 2000)

Other words I like include “speako” (an error in speaking), “time porn” (“television shows and other media that portray characters as having excessive amounts of spare time”), and “dining al desko” (eating at one’s desk).