TEXTUAL SATISFACTION!

What is the first thing you do immediately after coming out of a building in which the cell phone use is strictly prohibited? Or when you leave your boss’s cabin after an hour’s serious meeting with him? Perhaps the same thing that I do – taking out the mobile phone from the pocket impatiently and checking if I have any sms or missed calls!

And when you find that you had a few interesting messages or missed calls, you feel happy and you can’t hide the flash of smile on your face. You feel thrilled to see that someone was missing you when you were busy or unable to use the phone. Especially if the text messages/missed calls were from your beloved ones, you might feel ecstatic!

This feeling of satisfaction that you get when you realize that someone was missing you is called ‘textual satisfaction’. Notice the rhyming of the phrase with another well known term ‘sexual satisfaction’. Though the adjective ‘textual’ is related to text messages, the new coinage ‘textual satisfaction’ is now widely used to refer to the satisfaction from both sms and missed calls.

In this era of online social networking, the term is also used by many people to refer to the glimmer of happiness that you get when you see a good number of notifications, messages, comments or friend requests on such sites as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Orkut etc.

Do you know how much ‘textual satisfaction’ I get when I see a few precious comments by you on my blog? Indescribable!

Have you ever been Shanghaied?

A few days ago, I posted a blog on using ‘Bangalore’ as a verb. Today, let us discuss the name of another place which is also used as a verb. The place is Shanghai.

Shanghai is the most populated city in eastern China. In the mid of the 19^th century, it was difficult to get enough number of experienced sailors for the merchant ships headed to the Orient from the West (the Orient refers to the East Asian countries while the West is a common term for Europe and North America). When the sailors were not willing to join the ship, they were compelled by fraud means which included tricking, intimidating, kidnapping and even drugging them.

Shanghai was the most common destination for the ships with such abducted crews. So, when a sailor was forced for compulsory service aboard a merchant ship, his bad luck was described as ‘he was Shanghaied’.

In modern English, shanghai means ‘to trick or force somebody into doing something that they really do not want to do’. The past and past participle forms are shanghaied; the present participle form is shanghaiing.

More examples:

Simon shanghaied the girl into his Ferrari and drove away.

Mary’s parents are shanghaiing her into marrying Simpson.