Word of the Day: leptology

I’ve been rolling this one around in my brain for a while, and I think it finally turned into a ball, so, I’ll toss it out to you now. Feel free to toss it back.

Today’s Word:

leptology

As in:

Calvin Poole was a normal guy. He, like millions of people across the world,  joined Facebook to network, socially.

Calvin was something of an introvert. He worked for a software company, the same company he’d worked for since he graduated from college. He’d been there for nearly 20 years.

Aside from a few buddies from college, Calvin didn’t have many good friends, and he thought something like Facebook would be the answer. And it was. For awhile.

Calvin added all sorts of apps to his profile, scavenger hunts, puzzle challenges, word games, gardens and pets. He “friended” all sorts of people who enjoyed the same aps, until he had over 1000 friends. He started to develop his own apps, to meet even more friends.

He would leave work, telling his coworkers he had to go home early to water his garden, feed the fish, update his status, take a trivia quiz, and update his movie preferences. His co-workers scratched their heads, knowing that Calvin had extreme hay fever,  and was afraid of being next to open vessels of water with living things in them. He wouldn’t go near a lake.

Of course, Calvin didn’t have a real garden, nor actual living fish. He only had Facebook.

Soon, he no longer went to work. He spent all his time finding items, feeding digital fish, updating his status, and checking for friend requests.

He started posting rambling notes. His most recent, a leptology on the differences in the linguistic shifts from the original Battlestar Galactic to the current incarnation, 20 paragraphs of which talked about the fact that in the original series, Pyramid was the card game like Poker, and in the new series, Pyramid is the basketball-like game which was called Triad in the original series.

His friends became worried about him, when they noticed he was *always* online, and his status changed every 10 minutes around the clock. His sister called the local office of Health and Human Services, to see if someone could visit.

When they arrived, he let them in, and they discovered he’d been camped in a tiny corner of the house, with a small fridge. Groceries had been ordered online and delivered. It looked like he’d not left the desk chair in days. The smells were overpowering. Realizing this was a serious health issue, they took the poor man into state’s custody.

He fought them every step they took away from his beloved Facebook world. “Who’s going to care for my fish! They’ll die! I’ve provided 79 days of clean water to kids in Africa! Just let me update my status so my friend will know of this injustice! I can’t exist without broadband! Take me back!”

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It’s funny ‘cause it’s true. Okay. It’s not *exactly * true.

leptology  / LEPT – all – o – gee / a minute and tedious discourse on trivial matters