The term “brain fart” is one of those things that always makes me giggle. This is because I am English, and thus anything that involves the word “fart” is automatically hilarious. You can imagine the chaos that ensued in German lessons at school when we discovered that the German word for “father” is pronounced “farter”.
But I digress, before I’ve even started.
Brain farts are conclusive evidence that the human race still has scope to evolve further. There is no rational explanation for why we should experience such ridiculous lapses in judgement, memory and perception. But we do. Every single day. And every time it happens, we feel utterly ridiculous and very glad that, usually, no-one was around to see our stupid action.
The three examples above are all things that everyone has surely done, and probably recently. But there are hundreds of examples throughout everyday life. You don’t even have to be up and about and doing anything.
Take writing, for example. One of my favourite brain farts that occurs whilst writing is the inadvertent creation of portmanteau words. This happens because my brain writes faster than my fingers can type. My fingers can type pretty fast (85wpm, fact fans) but my brain is faster by virtue of the fact that it doesn’t have to actually move or indeed do anything except think. As such, I occasionally find myself thinking of the next word as I’m typing the previous one, and end up typing the end of the next word onto the current one. Let’s say that for whatever reason I am typing the words “dribbling mandibles”. I’ll start typing “dribbling” and maybe get as far as “drib” before my brain has already jumped ahead to the end of “mandibles”, meaning I’ll end up typing “dribdibles”, which clearly isn’t a word but should be. Fortunately I usually catch these when they happen. I’m actually quite tempted now to write a whole post where I leave all of them in and see if the text is still understandable.
Of course, being conscious of said brain farts renders them immediately impossible to recreate, so I’d just end up producing my own peculiar language and retreating into my own little world and having another kind of brain fart like I am right now where I get distracted halfway through a sentence and forget exactly what the point I was trying to make was, or indeed how to finish said sentence which means it runs on forever and ever until I finally decide to stop it decisively. Like that.
The worst kind of brain fart, though, is the one where you forget someone’s name. Usually immediately after they’ve told you it. Inevitably, you will be thrust into some sort of situation where you are required to introduce the people you are with to someone else whose name you may or may not remember, and you’ll introduce one of them in the hope that they’ll pick up on your imperceptible signals (so imperceptible that you’re not actually doing anything other than thinking “PLEASE TELL THEM YOUR NAME” really hard) and take you out of this hideous situation. But it never goes that way. Fortunately, most people are polite enough to fill an awkward silence and not point out that you’ve clearly forgotten some information that was put into your brain not two minutes previously.
So brain farts are fun. And rubbish. That is all.
What, you wanted something more profound? I’ve had a hard week.
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Dribdibles is now an official word. Lobbying those dictionary folk to make the most important addition they’ve had since ‘scallywag’.
You damn right “dribdibles” is a word. Unfortunately, it’s one of those words that it’s a little difficult to just slip into conversation. But I have faith it can be done.
What’s our context?
“Jerry looked like a right dribdible lying there, covered in his own vomit.”
“Sir, we’re stuck. One of the struts is caught on the rear dribdible.”
“There’s the problem. Nurse, a number three scalpel, if you may. Seems like our boy here has a rather nasty case of Spanish Drib’.”