Move over "bromance"...here comes "cangle"

There are many things I fear in life, most of which will never come true.

I’m pretty certain I’ll never be asked to perform a piano solo again. Not playing publically in almost 20 years has rendered my fingers, reach and memory woefully inadequate. Which is a good thing – very few situations leave me as entirely eaten up with fear as that experience.

Can’t remember the last time I stayed in a creepy hotel and I’m always certain to pull back the shower curtain, even in the nice ones,  looking for Norman Bates, so that’s eradicated as well.

It’s been years since I fell down a flight of stairs, but I have accomplished that feat more than once, which explain the tree-sloth slowness with which I now descend any staircase of more than three steps.

What I often dread, and actually did last Friday was lapse into “Lori-speak” at an inopportune time.  For those who don’t know, Lori-speak is the little known but curious language known only to myself and a few close friends and relatives.

I tend to make up words. Most likely it started with my incessant need to talk. I talk and walk in my sleep. I talk to myself. I talk to complete strangers. And it would make sense that for someone who talks all the time; inevitably you would run out of words.

So, last Friday in the middle of a staff meeting, surrounded by people I desperately want to impress and who I hope will eventually hold me in personal and professional high regard, I used the word “cangle.”

Cangle: a compound verb created when you combine carrot and dangle as in to “dangle a carrot” in front of someone or something to achieve a desired result.

I was recounting a conversation I had just finished with an information technology consultant who was wrapping a new web design project, when I stated something along the lines of “it was just the cangle I tried.”

All the heads around me cocked to one side, you know the way a dog does when you’ve been talking to it for too long, and I thought something was amiss, but couldn’t put my finger on it.

So I stopped and said to the woman across from me “What?” “What did I say?”

“Cangle?” was her response.

So I patiently explained the definition of a cangle.

About this time I heard a stifled giggled coming from the person in the chair to my left. Never mind that it was Marta Churchwell, former newspaper reporter. The same Marta Churchwell that I years ago placed upon a very tall pedestal where I hold her writing skills in the highest regard. Never mind that I had felt really confident about my communication skills that day.

I said cangle.

Oh well, I’ve decided to keep it. You may not be aware but, “bromance” and “walk-off” officially made it into the dictionary last year. I think there’s hope for cangle.