mundane
n.— «This is my best effort at a summary of Karyn Ashburn’s talk.…On those occasions when she showed up at a con to meet Elise, she saw lots of fans in groups talking. To her they seemed angry and rude. To Elise they seemed nothing of the sort. Observing them more closely, she realized that they were using different social cues, different body language, different eye contact, and even different ways of forming vowels than what she jokingly called “my people,” or what for convenience sake I’ll call mundanes.» —“Fannish Accent? Minicon panel” by Cally Soukup Usenet: rec.arts.sf.fandom Apr. 15, 1999. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
A caller wonders if she’s being hypersensitive about the way her boss addresses her in emails. Can the use of an employee’s first name ever reflect a power differential? And: a community choir director wants a term for “the act of...
Language is always evolving, and that’s also true for American Sign Language. A century ago, the sign for “telephone” was one fist below your mouth and the other at your ear, as if you’re holding an old-fashioned candlestick...