Last night at a dinner party (or what passes for a dinner party when you eat pre-six o'clock and half of the guests are four or under) I used the word fetishize to describe what rabid scrapbookers do to each passing moment of their child's life (i.e. the Baby's First Lotion! page with an assortment of photos of Junior cutely squeezing the lotion bottle, each photo trimmed with a different carefully scalloped paper frame and the whole page laid out in a "unique and creative" layout complete with fancy title font and most likely some captions, arrows, and doo-jiggy 3-D stickers sprinkled gaily about).

First I was accused of having made the word up, and then when I held my ground and insisted it was legit, there was a general "Oooh...NAUGHTY." reaction undoubtedly based on the fact that they had a general knowledge of the popular meaning of fetish.

Being me, I went ahead and looked it up in the dictionary this morning, and of course not only was my meaning in there, but it was the second definition (theirs was the third one). Not that I really doubted that it was a real word and that I'd used it correctly. You can't get through a graduate studies in English program without the power trio of fetishize, commodify, and reify

So I was right and all, but I guess mr rampy, at least, had reason to doubt me seeing as how during our conversation on the way to dinner I'd used the word hugerer to describe something larger than huge.