Nathan and Ben began their discussion of Episode 11 with a few choice confabulations in their vocabulary.  First, Ben was confused as to whether “interleavened” was a word.  It’s not.  Had he let the dough of his brain rise somewhat, he would have realized the word is the syllabically simpler “interleaved“, meaning “with alternating layers”.

Nathan then goes on to coin and define the term “telephastic”, which seems to exist in real life only as a Reddit/Steam username, the title of a blog theme, and a typographical error in relation to the Boards of Canada song “Telephasic Workshop”.  You can listen to “Telephastic” Workshop as the second track in this playlist.

For other fake words in comedy, there’s always the pertinent example of The Simpsons creating the term “cromulent“, but there are also longstanding British traditions of recognizing that language sometimes sounds real without having any actual root or core.  As Nathan likes to refer to Rowan Atkinson, we are required to bring up the episode of Blackadder the Third where E. Blackadder, Esq. attempts to add nonsense to Samuel Johnson’s dictionary.  Further, honorary “seventh Python” Douglas Adams collaborated on the well-loved Meaning of Liff series, and we would be remiss if we didn’t mention Fry and Laurie’s infamous “Talking About Language” sketch.

Cover art taken from Jonathan Burton‘s contribution to the Colour Plus Noun Monty Python poster exhibit from Spring 2016.