Here are two useful words. The first is served up by Boing-Boing:
Word of the day: Froschmausekrieg
OK, it’s German (sort of), but like schadenfreude, schnitzel, and schnauzers, it’s easily adopted. George Dyson explains:“My favorite (descriptive if not lengthy) German word is Froschmausekrieg. It means “war between the frogs and the mice” and the file in this photo was so named by Helen Dukas (Einstein’s secretary and literary executor) to describe the long and bitter dispute between the School of Math and the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study. A good word to know when facing such a dispute.”
The second word, coined today, is a variant served up by Robin Abrahams, our psychology editor. She explains:
George W. Bush said (in Saginaw, Michigan, on September 29, 2000):
“I know the human being and fish can coexist peacefully.”
He was simultaneously creating, alluding to, and expressing disbelief in an idea: the idea that fish and humans are at war with each other. This idea (or concept, or whatever it is) deserves a name. Now we know what to call it: fischmenschkrieg.