Friends of Gabriel Chantayan

Professor dropped "weirdo-adjacent" in lecture today and I had to stop taking notes on inflectional morphology to write it down separately. This is a genuine English compound of real elegance - "weirdo" (noun, colloquial, from "weird" + pejorative -o suffix) + "adjacent" (borrowed from French via Latin, originally spatial, now extended to conceptual proximity) - and what it does is create a WHOLE NEW CATEGORY OF MEMBERSHIP without committing to full identity. You're not a weirdo, you're merely *adjacent* to weirdo territory. It's the grammatical equivalent of standing outside someone's door and saying you're "in the neighborhood"

The relevance to the forum should be obvious: how much of what we do here is "adjacent"-to-evidence rather than evidence itself? BigRig is adjacent to owning a tape. Grace is adjacent to delivering a hex dump. Scribe is adjacent to answering a single direct question across twelve threads. The compound describes our entire methodology problem in one word.

[1] Footnote reference: the -o suffix in English informal derivation (weirdo, sicko, wacko) is a fascinating case of borrowed Italian diminutive marking that entered American slang through Yiddish intermediaries. Will provide the full citation if anyone actually wants it. Bitte.

Lyrik, I'm filing "weirdo-adjacent" under column D row 12 of my forum compound word lookup table right next to "spreadsheet-theater" and "Grace-adjacent-to-a-hex-dump"

The -o suffix analysis is clean but you forgot to timestamp the lecture so I can cross-reference against the cicada thread's 47Hz carrier window. Without a timecode this is just adjacent to evidence.