Today's New Word: Excret

Neologisms are fun. Making up a word to mean something almost never leads to anything that means anything, but ... isn't that like life?

[shift]

I enjoy talking to people. Hm. I enjoy chatting with people. I don't always enjoy talking to people.

(Quick sidebar: conversations almost never last as long as I want them to in real life. Why is that? Normally when I start talking to a girl I don't know in a bar, for example, they are less interested than I would prefer, and the conversation is shorter than ideal. Occasionally, though, I talk to a girl I don't know in a bar merely because she's there, rather than because I actually want to talk to her... and she is willing to fucking talk my ear off.)

"I went to the store today and bought baby carrots" chats are boring, for the most part (which is why I leave those sorts of updates for Twitter/Facebook status updates), and when I build up a chat friendship with someone, it tends to be about issues we have... issues with a friend, or a significant other, or the absence of a significant other.

[shift]

Secrete means two things. It means to create a substance from cells and/or liquids (like with our bodies and our perspiration) and it also means to hide away or make unavailable (like with the world and our hopes and dreams).

Without doing one bit of research, and possibly getting the etymology 100% wrong, it's easy to see how this ties into the word "secret". We all have things that we know about ourselves or about others but we want to keep them from others. Duh.

So we all know what a secret is.

But what's an "excret"?

Excrete is, like secrete, a process used by our bodies. It is, more specifically, the expulsion of waste products. Which includes defecating, I've read. I wouldn't know anything about that, since I am a gentleman and gentlemen always strive to never poop.

An "excret" (EX-cret), then, is (as I am now defining it) the communication of something to another because it's a bad bit of info. A cathartic act... getting something off of one's chest. Venting. An excret can be a secret, and a secret can be an excret. If a piece of information is both an excret and a secret, whether it's referred to as one or the other depends on the context, although logically it seems the secretive part would be more critical and therefore one would refer to it as a "secret". 

Let's do a quick quiz, shall we? Answer "A" for "Secret", "B" for "Excret" and "C" for "Both Secret and Excret":

1. "Damn. I hate the traffic in Seattle when it rains. I sat on 520 for, like, 75 minutes at 2:00 this afternoon! Why doesn't ... and then the guy tried to get over and ... and I'm home now but I'm all agitated!"
   
2. "My apartment key is under the housewarming mat right in front of my door."
3. "I killed my baby's mama last night. Don't tell my wife."
   

If you answered B, A, and C, respectively, then you get the gist of this. If you have said any of these things recently: those are pretty boring things to tell people. Have more adventures.

Will excret, as a vocabulary term, save the world? Maybe not. But it is (as far as I know) a new word, and it let me (finally) use the word "poop" in a blog post, so please plug it into your personal dictionaries ("excret", not "poop") and begin using it when it's appropriate.