Shit happens

As I trudged home through the unseasonal winter chill last night, I kept myself warm by rattling off a little exchange of text messages with my translator buddy, The Weeble - who has not been seen these last several days because he has so much work on at the moment.   As so often with us, the wordplay soon got rather silly.   I began by asking if he was returned to society yet, or was languishing in the translation dungeon.   He responded that he was indeed still in an oubliette, and up to his neck in shit.   I tried to encourage him to try some positive thinking, to Oubliez le merde!   I was then inspired to coin the term merderie to describe his situation.  (Perhaps it already exists in French, but I am damn well going to take the credit for adopting and popularizing it in English.)  There's something about the French language that seems particularly well-suited to furnishing words for this class of thing.... although I did also mint an Anglo-Saxon alternative, poopmire (or perhaps poopmere too?).  I like the alliteration of mired in merderie; or the simplicity (well, simple but for deceitful insinuation that this may be a genuine piece of French usage) of en merderie.   The Weeble continued to emphasise how excessively merderieux was his current state.   I ventured that it sounded like "what I think Vonnegut called The Grand Ah-Whoom - the cataclysmic shitstorm that ends the world."   Of course, he would get the reference (Cat's Cradle - apparently venerated by us both as a favourite Vonnegut work).   He quibbled that the Bokononist term for 'shitstorm' was in fact pool-pah.  I had forgotten that, but it's ringing a bell.  I was reluctant to hazard a bar bet with him on the point, as I'm in a very poor run of form on those just lately - and it is utterly foolhardy to challenge a man with such a compendious memory.    However, I think pool-pah is a general term for egregious unpleasantness and inconvenience in any area of life, whereas the ah-whoom is the Armageddon event, the massive pool-pah that causes The End Of The World.  So - for once - perhaps we're both right....?   I can't remember how Bokonon elaborated on the relationship between the two concepts.  It's all foma anyway.