Ellen DeGeneres, more celebs helping get CNY-invented word 'orbisculate' in dictionary syracuse.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from syracuse.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
The Kriegers at Boston Harbor in 1988 for a ferry trip.
In the early aughts, Hilary Krieger was sitting in her parents Boston, US home, when her friend accidentally squirted himself with an orange slice. I said, Oh, the orange just orbisculated, she recalls. And he said, It did what? The two made a $5 bet, and Krieger gleefully grabbed the family dictionary. She flipped to the O section and stared at the spot on the page where orbisculate should have been. My first thought is, What s wrong with this dictionary? she says. Aghast, Krieger burst into her dad s study and told him the shocking news: Orbisculate is somehow not in the dictionary!
Syracuse grad tries to get 'orbisculate,' a word invented in CNY, added to dictionary syracuse.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from syracuse.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Hilary and Jonathan Krieger do not remember the first time their father, Neil, used the word “orbisculate.”
They were just kids then, and he said the made-up word (pronounced ȯr-BIS-kyoo-leyt) meant “to accidentally squirt juice and/or pulp into one’s eye” or other body part as in, what happens whenever one attempts to eat a grapefruit.
Now Hilary, who is 44, and Jonathan, 35, are on a mission to get “orbisculate” into the dictionary to memorialize their father, who died last April from Covid-19 at 78.
And they’re not stopping there: their website includes a 50-item bucket list for the word, including getting it into a story on a major news site (check: the Boston Globe wrote the story in December), a crossword puzzle and a Saturday Night Live sketch. Or how about getting Ben & Jerry’s to use it in the name for a new flavor, perhaps involving grapefruit sorbet?