A Willipus-Wallipus Types Lapslock

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette. Here’s a word I just added to my vocabulary, and you might want to add it too if you don’t know it. Willipus wallipus. Willipus wallipus. What did the doctor say caused that?

A willipus wallipus, which is w-i-l-l-i-p-u-s hyphen w-a-l-l-i-p-u-s. In the late 19th century, a willipus wallipus was this vague, legendary monster with lots of legs that supposedly haunted the American South. But soon after, it became a term that applied to a steamroller or some similar large machine that you’d use on the road, any large piece of road equipment.

And I was just looking at a 1932 newspaper that talked about the town’s municipal willipus wallopus. I’ve been thinking about willopus wallopus for any large thing. My dog Bear is getting really big and I heard myself call him willopus wallopus the other day. I’m going to…

Yeah, it’s a cute term, right? Well, I wonder if in the fanfic world, if anybody has written about willopus wallopus. And I’m thinking about fanfic because the word I’ve come across recently, I didn’t know I needed it, but boy, did I. It’s the opposite of caps lock.

The opposite of caps lock.

Yeah, so instead of putting down the caps lock key and typing everything in all capital letters, it’s laps lock, where you don’t type anything in capital letters, not even the first letter of a sentence or someone’s name or the pronoun I.

Laps lock, L-A-P-S-L-O-C-K.

And it’s the kind of thing that a fan fiction writer might do to kind of set their style or set their tone. You might see it on AO3, the website Archive of Our Own.

And it’s particularly the kind of term that you would use when somebody should have used capitalization. They were like, oh, the lapse lock fanfic. I can’t read this.

I was spelling it in my mind, L-A-P-S-E. You know, like they just forgot. I think that’s part of the hint there, part of the connotation.

Yes, they’re lapsing and they’re caps locking. We’re using the words willopus wallopus and lapse lock these days. What are you using?

Let us know. 877-929-9673 or send it to us in email. The address is words@waywordradio.org.