I approve of the way James Joyce combined English words as if he were writing in German.

He especially liked fusing adjectives as in “snotgreen” or “chalkscrawled” or “sanguineflowered.”

Dig this: “bluesilver razorshells.”

Unfortunately, if you’re dumbassspeller like me and need your spellchecker to autocorrect, you’re not likely to follow Joyce’s lead because of those goddamn redunderlinings. Undoing them by doublechecking every possible error results in tedious timewasting.

Anyway, sometimes a fusedword will sneak into the language. Today, I learned a new one: failson.

Here’s the Urban Dictionary’s ungrammatical definition:

White, middle-class, male, useless people—who have just enough family context to not be crushed by poverty.

Felix, the failson of the family, goes downstairs at Thanksgiving, briefly mumbles, ‘Hi,’ everyone asks him how community college is going, he mumbles something about a 2.0 average, goes back upstairs with a loaf of bread and some peanut butter, and gets back to gaming and masturbating.

 A failson is not to be confused with a trustafarian, which is gender neutral:

Privileged white kids who subscribe to the hippie lifestyle (because they can) since they have no worries about money, a job etc. They can then devote their lives to eating organic, following Phish, and wearing dreadlocks (no need for job interviews).

 Sarah is a trustafarian. It’s totally evidenced by the combination of her brand new car[1] and nice digs with her “earthy” clothes and dreadlocks.

I suspect failsons tend to hole themselves up in their rooms and suffer from an EmilyDickinsonian/EdgarAllanPoeish pallor whereas the tanned Trustafarian I know who lives on Folly Beach frequently appears in public and is a ubiquitous source of putoff. When he’s not tripping on shrooms, he’s smugly pontificating in a hauterladen voice.

Him, me no dig.

But what about Jared Kushner? What’s the word for him?

How about nepotistickleptocrat?

 

In English, a hybrid language, there’s almost a word for everything.

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[1] Or, as Joyce would put it brandnewcar.