I’m going to say something which may sound counter-intuitive by the standards of common business values: I want your help to help me to do my job properly. Even though I don’t know who you are and likely never will (through no fault of my own, of course – cue possible laughter, no doubt). Or do I deserve appreciation for my honesty?

Either way, I have a point to make, and that point is my claim that many an everyday Joe Bloggs has shown linguistic inventiveness, without necessarily having resolved to do so beforehand. You certainly don’t need to be a language professional like me to do it. I think of a certain newspaper article that must now be about ten years old, give or take, that listed certain “fashionable” “real English” expressions. When I use the word “fashionable”, you probably think I’m talking about slang or swear words, or common expressions pertaining to things which, while they continue to garner the interest of plenty of people, frequently cause embarrassment or worse (like the, shall we say, less traditionally accepted attitudes to sex in our society), but I’m not. In a way they are lauded purely as expressions of convenience – which come to think of it, doesn’t make them different from any other expression – the only difference is that they’re expressions of convenience that you’re just more likely to remember keenly than other ones, and it’s probably because chances are that you’d learn them at school (at least from a teacher, as part of a classroom lesson), or from a trusted academic dictionary, rather than anywhere else are virtually zero. Like “sheeple”: a mixture between “sheep” and “people”, which means a group of people who don’t think for themselves and always follow the crowd. Or eating “al desco”: derived from “al fresco”, it means eating at your desk, like a lunch break. I’ve invented words like this too. Indeed, in an earlier comment on here I described “dack” as meaning a load of personal possessions / stuff which you’ve had for ages – weeks, months or even years – but even after all this time you’ve never sampled it properly. A DVD can be dack if you’ve had it for so, so long but never seen it. A book can be dack if you’ve had it for so, so long but never read it. And so on, and so forth.

Maybe there have been occasions in your life when you weren’t sure how something should be named / described / referenced but you nevertheless ardently wished you could think of something for the specific reason that it really is to do with something that is commonplace, or it reflects something specific about someone or something. Just recently I myself invented the term “squain” (an adjective) which means like, “things which, while they can be likeable or amusing and there’s nothing wrong with them, are things that you just wouldn’t do in, say, a fancy restaurant, or if you wanted to impress someone you regarded as being of higher status than yourself.” I’m talking about things which have no substance or “seriousness weight” whatsoever, like the song “Friday”, and look at how many people have laughed at that song, whatever their reputation for being kind or nice. (Sorry Rebecca, but at the end of the day, that song was never going to be worth all the excitement you surely enjoyed during its recording and marketing. Did you get out much during those days? I doubt it.) The pastime of backmasking (playing songs in reverse with the display of subtitles of the words which you think it most sounds like – and you may hear some VERY weird things sometimes) is popular on Youtube: there are many people who find it amusing for reasons which I have accepted as obvious. But backmasking is definitely a squain thing in my eyes. As is beatboxing (like Beardyman). I used to be proud that I could think of more than twenty six-letter words whose letters are in alphabetical order (repeated letters allowed). Is that clever? …Today, I think of even that as somewhat squain. Long ago I once saw an advert in which someone jumped really high in the air off the ground and, whilst they were in the air, it looked like a car drove under them really fast, and then the person landed on their feet again; to me, that is but one reminder of many that squain things are not uncommon in the media. Talking of the media, to me there are two kinds of people in this world: those who find the well-known show “You’ve Been Framed” funny, and those who find it embarrassing or annoying. Without showing empathy to either, I state here that by now you’ve probably called “You’ve Been Framed” videos squain, just as I do.
At this point you may find it interesting to know that I remember once making the claim that there comes a point in your life when you’re no longer amused by videos of dancing parrots on Youtube.

Anyway, I believe that, if you know better, you won’t do squain things if trying to pull someone. There have been plenty of job interview / application “horror stories” which are called that because the “horror” was something someone found unbelievably squain, especially in the realm of the world of work. Some job interview / application “horror stories” will leave you outraged, and some will make you want to cry, but some will make you want to laugh or are just plain weird even if they are called “horror stories” – here’s a link to a bumper collection of the sort of thing that I am talking about http://www.resumania.com/ResumaniaArchive .
I suppose squain can indeed be “good” or “bad”.

So what do people think of those who do that which is squain? I think of a politically incorrect joke in which the police at Croydon police station are playing hide and seek around the station – it’s a training exercise, which they’ve been made to perform ever since their failure to find Tia Sharp. If I happened to see police officers playing hide and seek around my local police station… well, you can say what you want how I should probably be disturbed, but I think I would label that as squain behaviour. So my personal conclusion is that people who allow themselves to be caught engaging in squain behaviour run the risk of losing credibility and others’ trust in them if they’re not careful (that said, I do wish Rebecca Black well). In short, people may start to stop taking them seriously (probably even if they are allegedly just like they are). And that is my example in the point I am trying to make.

Not that I’ve overlooked the possibility that certain things that I would today call squain may well have already been described as something else by other people – maybe “silly” or “daft” – and long before I invented the word “squain”. But I do insist that the true origins of the word “squain” are unlikely to be the same as those of “silly” or “daft”. My ultimate point here is that this kind of “fashionable” language is language that most people keenly remember because it “really does” relate to common everyday phenomena and plays a role in helping people to identify with such phenomena, or because it “really is” indicative of something specific about something else. And it is this kind of language for which I would love to find a comprehensive site that lists equivalent expressions in other languages (refer to the point in the original paragraph of this article). It’s just easy to anyone find a source online that teaches you slang or swear expressions in another language, wouldn’t you say? But what is the French or German for “sheeple” (or should that be: “In the likely event that there is not a term for ‘sheeple’ in French or English, what should it be?”)? Or is this just wishful thinking on my part?

Maybe some readers of this comment have been quick to think of certain words in other languages (meaning squain or anything else) for which there is no straightforward translation; “Schadenfreude” in German is probably the most well-known example of this. Go ahead and compare these two kinds of words at your leisure, and say to me what you want about them.