The Rice University Neologisms Database

the ability to recognize and understand typed, nonsensical, misspelled gibberish. This word is a play on words due to its rhyming reference and sound similarity to hypoglycemia, a disorder characterized by unusually low blood sugar levels. The ability to recognize and comprehend blatantly misspelled words is seen as a strange trait, so the author relates this odd proficiency to an equally odd disorder. The writer clearly wanted to convey her ideas and findings in a clever, unique way to poke fun at the astounding revelation that people are easily able to understand words despite flagrant misspellings. Hypoglycemia is an uncommon disorder, and the writer believes that the mind’s fantastic ability to conceptualize jumbled, unorganized phrases is an equally uncommon, novel discovery. In essence, she is using an analogy to compare the rarity of hypoglycemia with the brain’s recognition of misspelled words. Typo, a typographical error, is easily blended into ‘hypoglycemia’ because ‘typo’ and ‘hypo’ only differ by a beginning sound. Typo and hypoglycemia easily flow together because of their strong similarity in sound. Typoglycemia sounds like a pedantic, medical term, but typoglycemia is absolutely unrelated to ‘glycemia,’ the presence of glucose in the bloodstream. By using typoglycemia, the writer sounds quite knowledgeable and bookish. However, the author certainly did not intend the neologism to evoke a sense of intelligence or medical ingenuity. Instead, the author sought to be cute and creative in relating a sugar disorder to a mental typing and cognitive phenomenon. The author was amazed at the brain’s awesome capacity of understanding and did not know of a term that described this abnormality; as a result, she thought of hypoglycemia, a medical, intelligent term and decided to blend typo and hypoglycemia to articulate the medical, amazing power of the brain.