Like Douglas Adams cataloguing the unnamed emotions of modern life in The Meaning of Liff, but aimed squarely at the interface layer between humans and platforms, Stuart Heritage's glossary piece operates through a deceptively simple mechanism: name the thing that annoys you, and suddenly you can see the system producing it. The coinages range from the surgical — John Gruber's "dickover" for content-obscuring modals — to the bluntly effective: "quit-shaming" for the dark-pattern gauntlet of cancelling a subscription, "chatflattery" for LLMs sycophantically agreeing that ham icing is delicious. The strongest entries work because they compress a structural critique into a single word. "AI-horning" — AI features shoehorned into products that didn't need them — lands because it names the specific absurdity of Google Gemini replacing Google Assistant and becoming worse at navigation. The anecdote is precise: the car that used to say "Sure, navigating to KFC" now delivers a paragraph about locations within 100 miles containing the letters K, F, and C. That's not a joke. That's a product regression described accurately. "Chattermining" is the entry with the most genuine unease. Heritage describes a family conversation about buying a fall-alert pendant for an unwell relative — nothing searched, nothing typed — followed by Facebook ads for exactly that product. The piece doesn't attempt to resolve whether devices are listening. It just names the experience and lets the reader's own paranoia do the work. Smart move. The middle section sags slightly. "Parkware" (competing parking apps), "gatejamming" (QR-code fumbling at train barriers), and "baggravation" (self-checkout dysfunction) are all real irritations, but they describe inconvenience rather than extraction. The piece is at its best when the coinage reveals a power asymmetry — a company making cancellation deliberately hard, an AI agreeing with you to retain your subscription — and weaker when it's just cataloguing friction. "Socket boomerism" and "Schrödinger's wifi" are funny but structurally thin. The format itself is the craft decision worth noting. A glossary gives Heritage permission to be brief, opinionated, and move fast. No entry overstays. The piece covers 18 terms across dickovers, AI-horning, captchore, quit-shaming, cart cling, chatflattery, botiquette, chattermining, loginsanity, limpetlisting, parkware, gatejamming, baggravation, parcel liveblogging, socket boomerism, and Schrödinger's wifi without any of them feeling padded. That's disciplined writing disguised as a listicle. What Heritage is actually doing — and this is why the piece deserves more than a skim — is building a shared vocabulary for platform hostility. The reason "dickover" spread when Gruber coined it in May is that people recognized the experience instantly but had no word for it. Language creates legibility. Once you can say "quit-shaming," you can see the pattern across Netflix, the New York Times, and every gym membership. The glossary is a complaint letter, yes. But it's also a diagnostic tool. The piece trails off rather than ending — Schrödinger's wifi is literally cut mid-sentence, which may be an editorial artifact or a deliberate joke about British train connectivity. Either way, the strongest entries (dickover, AI-horning, chatflattery, chattermining, quit-shaming) earn the read. The weakest are filler that any Twitter thread could produce. The hit rate is about 60%, which for an 18-entry glossary piece is honestly pretty good.
