‘Phrop’ is my new favorite word
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I have a new favorite word and, no, it’s not “hygge.” Similar to “hygge,” though, this word looks like you dropped a random handful of Scrabble letters onto the gameboard in an attempt to convince your friend that it’s a real word. My new favorite word is “phrop.” Coined by Sir Arnold Lunn in the late 1940s, “phrop” was Lunn’s entry in a made-up word competition in “The New Statesman,” according to Philip Howard in his 1984 book “The State of Language.” It seems Sir Arnold created the word “phrop” as a combination of the words “phrase” and “opposite.” When you break down this idea, you get a phrase that means the opposite of what it actually means.