Dear Bleaders,
My husband John Chaneski invented a word. It is "igry" and it means social embarrassment. Someone else is doing something that makes you embarrassed for them, whether or not they are themselves embarrassed.
In fact, when they are embarrassed they are doing most of the heavy lifting and the igry others suffer in watching is much lightened. Igry is keenest when the smart cool guy doesn't know that he has said something terribly off, or is singing terribly off key, or has generally gone off kilter -- his head still whistling dixie and the rest of him and us and all dignity gone helter-skelter.
I tear up from igry. The joke some poker is proffering is croaking and tears come to my eyes in my trial to grin while someone else is bearing it, and so that my husband who perhaps is not paying attention to the act in question doesn't think I'm suddenly miserable I explicate with a gesture towards my tears and a single word: "Igry," say I. Not only is this a frequent need, but the word itself a pleasure. Why? Because other than hungry and angry, the English language, its bar engine revving to find a rhyme for orange in time, does not have much in the way of words that end gry. Now it's got another.
Use it in good health!
love,
that bundle of meter and nerve that goes by the name to which I answer, Jennifer
