Future Words

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Glitchenfreude

(n.)

The vindicated delight of watching supposedly godlike technology fail in public.

He felt a flicker of glitchenfreude watching the robot faceplant during its Michael Jackson dance routine.

Does it ring true?

From the future, or already here?

Coinage notes

A descendant of Schadenfreude (German Schaden, harm + Freude, joy), pronounced GLITCH-en-froy-duh. The satisfying sense of cosmic justice when someone gets their comeuppance is now applied to high profile tech fails. The more godlike the tech becomes, the better the fumble makes you feel.

TECHNOLOGY

Sloptimism

(n.)
A defiantly optimistic embrace of AI-generated “slop,” grounded in the faith that genuinely important new forms of culture will emerge from it.

WORK & CAREERS

Incompletence

(n.)
The paradoxical state where AI demonstrates competence at the hardest 90% of a task, yet incompetence at the seemingly trivial final 10%.

FUTURE INSULTS

Luddlite

(n.)
A part-time technophobe who wears tech refusal as a badge of honor, declining the conveniences easiest to sacrifice and secretly keeping the rest.
Future Words book cover

There are 99 more where this came from.

Future Words: A Non-Obvious Glossary of Terms That Don’t Exist (But Soon Will) collects all 100, each with its example sentence and coinage notes, from the bestselling authors of The Future Normal. Hardcover, October 20, 2026.

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