In today's MeMo at the Houston Chronicle, Kyrie O'Connor seems to have coined a new word:
Insight at the Slightly Depressed Smoothie Place. The world would be a lot better if bosses didn't behave like jerks. OK, I just said insight. I didn't say original insight. But here's an example. The formula for making the squid-ink smoothies must be very inexact, because whether the manager or one of the smoothistas makes one, there is always a lot left in the blender. Now, what the smoothistas do is they just get a bigger cup and give me, the customer, the extra. The manager fills the right-size cup and then dumps the rest out. What can be the possible rationale for this? So I won't be disappointed if they ever figure out how to make smoothies the proper size?
Google finds no instances of smoothistas, and the only return for smoothista is a Finnish inflected form in the context "jotka hyppää toistaiseksi smoothista kokonaisuudesta esiin kuin sukellusvene Gobin autiomaassa" (which I hope is not unsuitable for quotation in a family weblog...).
Now, maybe smoothista is already well established down there in Houston, or maybe Ms. O'Connor just coined it, I don't know. But it looks to me like it hasn't been written down before, and I think it's a keeper.
Posted by Mark Liberman at June 17, 2004 05:04 PM