Idiomdrottning’s homepage

Noromo

Sometimes when people say something that might sound kinda romantic but that’s not why they’re saying it, they’ll say “noromo” (which originated in the X-files fandom; whether it’s related to the sometimes kinda homophobic marker “no homo”, I’m not sure but probably).

It’s kind of good, sometimes a statement like “hey, you really mean a lot to me” can get confused for flirting and sometimes it can be kinda precious and sweet to disambiguate it, so there can be some value to noromo.

However, I wish there was a version of noromo that was more limited in discourse-syntactic scope: this particular statement is noromo. And saying “uh, that only applies to this particular statement” explicitly is not good, might lead the listener into fallaciously affirming the disjunct; because cognitive psychology ain’t logical and if you say “this only apply to this one thing” they might mistakenly think that there must be a pony somewhere.

So instead what I’d want is a word that just inherently was scoped to its antecedent phrase, neither over- or underemphasing the scoping.