While attending the King County Bar Association's 2001 Bench-Bar Conference today, my mind slipped away from the weighty subjects on which a splendid array of speakers held forth, and concentrated instead on how they chewed up the English language. Joseph D, Lehman, the Secretary of the State Department of Corrections (which runs all the prisons) used two interesting words: "anominity" -- which is, I suppose, a state of mental and emotion upset resulting from a loss of values -- and "phenomenom" -- which may mean a word used to describe an observable event. The Hon. Michael J. Fox, Judge of the King County Superior Court, used the word "crooshible" to descibe a situation which puts one to the test.

There is a name for this.