A friend reports that she fortuitously-inadvertently invented a new word recently, via finger-failure while typing:

Its definition? Maybe "a chance to take advantage of bad circumstances". Or perhaps, more crudely but sometimes more importantly, "the possibility of going to the loo".

And that thought apropos the knock of opportunity (the word my comrade was actually trying to type) reminds me of the answer that Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, reputedly gave to reporters who asked him what great lesson he had learned from his long experience in warfare:

(see also SelfAbsorption (27 Mar 2003), ... )

TopicLanguage - TopicHumor - 2004-09-13

(correlates: ChatTuringTest, PrepetitionAndPrepeating, LearningInconsistency, ...)