The Second Life® Dictionary of Virtual Experience: Inventory

One of my favourite dip-in books is Douglas Adams’ and John Lloyd’s ‘The Meaning of Liff’.  This wonderful little book puts UK place names to work describing things which currently have no word for them in the English language.  Examples of this include ‘Ible,’ defined as ‘clever but lazy’ and ‘Scramoge,’ defined as ‘to cut oneself whilst licking envelopes’.

It occurs to me that, as virtual world living appears set to become a more mainstream phenomena, it’s perhaps time we started defining some of the more familiar metaverse experiences so that future generations can benefit from an established lexicon when struggling to come to terms with life in prims and pixels.  After all, what point is there in being a pioneer if you don’t pass forward all this learning in some way?  It’s a process I in fact already started several years ago when – as no doubt you are already aware – I coined the term, ‘fatal crosspost’.

In the first of a possible occasional series of themed articles, therefore, I humbly present a new vocabulary of virtual world words and phrases.  This week, the focus is on inventory.

Boxoarding The habit of saving all the pretty bags and boxes stuff comes in, thinking they might come in useful some day as decoration.

Chaosinveneptance The moment of formally giving up on the idea of an organised inventory.

Dislibrientation The period of time during which you believe your entire inventory appears to have been replaced with someone else’s before realising you’re looking through the library folder.

Droplosting A complicated, yet devastating error which occurs when you’re trying to move an item from one folder to another and lose the mouse-hold at some point in between, thereby losing the item and having to look for it in every fucking folder.

Foundstasy The unexpected joy of guessing correctly on the very first go the name of an old item using the inventory search box.

Nonmeshicide The act of purging your inventory of all non-mesh clothing.

Objephobia An avoidance of searching for self-created items in inventory out of a fear that you did not rename them from ‘object’.

Ontolinveniety Existential angst over the understanding that there is no such thing as ‘your’ inventory.

Outfipheny The moment you realise the time you will save by creating outfit folders.

Phalusorrow The depression which follows a long hunt for your prim penis.  If you have to search for it, it’s clearly not being used very often.

Plingfury The anger experienced when a lengthy inventory search finally reveals that your desired item’s name is exactly the same as your original search text only with an exclamation mark at the beginning.

Plingineering Trying to work out, through trial and error naming, which combination of non-alphanumeric characters will move a folder up to the top of your inventory.

Ranpicturing The act of dropping a photo you took at a party on a complete stranger because their dance animation happened to bring them between you and the person you actually wanted to give it to at the exact moment you released the mouse button.

Skinmalaise The sense of depression that ensues on realisation that the purchase of a new skin will require editing all of your outfit folders.

Termininvent An aborted attempt at organising your inventory.  This word can be prefixed, with supertermininvent referring to an attempt which failed after no more than ten folders were tidied up and megatermininvent referring to one which failed the instant the inventory window was opened.

Vendritation The anger experienced towards a creator for not naming their items more obviously.

Can you expand on my lexicon?  Your comments and suggestions below are warmly invited.

More SL words: Avatar animation

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