canderflabble
n.— «I once read an article about useful foreign words that had no English counterpart, and it mentioned some language (I forget which) that had a noun meaning “the state of two people each waiting to see if the other will volunteer to address an unpleasant situation that has recently arisen and could be handled by either but which neither wants to do.” If the English word for that was canderflabble, I’d say that my wife and I spend a good portion of our nights engaged in canderflabble.» —“Roundtable: New Fathers, Round II” by Matthew Baldwin The Morning News Nov. 22, 2004. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
It was a dark and stormy night. So begins the long and increasingly convoluted prose of Edwards Bulwer-Lytton’s best-known novel. Today the annual Bulwer-Lytton Contest asks contestants for fanciful first sentences that are similarly...
A librarian opens a book and finds a mysterious invitation scribbled on the back of a business card. Another discovers a child’s letter to the Tooth Fairy, tucked into a book decades ago. What stories are left untold by these forgotten...