What's with all the kerfussle ?

It's not as though The Daily Candy Lexicon is the Oxford English Dictionary or the complete works of Shakespeare or something weighty like that.

It's just a fluffy little book of fabricated words made up by a team of nameless editors of the Daily Candy website.

You'd be excused for assuming that Daily Candy is some flabulous new diet of judrops, jelly ranchers and wormybears.

But no, it's an extremely sexccessful website started in 2000 by Dany Levy, a former editor at New York magazine.

It now has more than 2.5 million subscibers, who receive a daily e-mail about what's hot and trendy in the worlds of shopping, dating, dining out and personal preening. There are specific editions for 12 American cities, as well as candy for travel, kids, deals and "everywhere."

By logging on to dailycandy.com or simply opening their e-mail, the pink mojito set can get the latest on couture motorcycle helmets, dog matchmakers, crocodile skin chaps, valet dry cleaning services and what's on the menu at Fat Man's Bar-B-Que in Miami.

Various observers have commented that the Daily Candy content is "saccharine sweet goo," "rewritten press releases," "cliquish chick-lit chirp," "blogarrhea," an "opiate for the masses" and "part of a larger post-Commie conspiracy."

Whatever, now they've bookified it.

The Daily Candy Lexicon: Words That Don't Exist but Should is, in its own words, "a dictionary of new words: words we've created, heard, or think we will hear soon."

Like drailing (e-mailing while drunk), touron (a moronic tourist), ickymaki (a frightening sushi dish) and guyatus (on hiatus from men). But big deal, there's nothing new about that. Writers have been making up words since time commencicated.

Remember Jabberwocky, in which Lewis Carroll warned readers to "beware the Jubjub bird and shun the frumious Bandersnatch?"

Frumious! Now that's a word.

Dr. Seuss gave us the ooblek, the lorax and the sneetch. Shel Silverstein introduced the mehoo with an exactlywatt and the yipiyuk that wouldn't let go.

W.C. Fields came up with an illness known as mogo-on-the-go-go-go and a kissing game he called squidgilum (which he tried to play with the lovely Oulotta Hemogloben in Never Give a Sucker an Even Break).

Daily Candy's "disdress," (the agony caused by having to strip in communal dressing rooms) is a flimpid kind of word compared to Edward Lear's "scroobious," which he used to describe the pip who could see the jellybolee. It was Lear who brought us the attery squash and the bisky bat who lived in the hat of the quangle wangle quee.

"Lavawhory" (Candy's epithet for someone who takes too long in the airplane toilet) doesn't hold a candle to "snozzcumber," Roald Dahl's word for a particularly revolting vegetable.

Really, exactly how clever or funny is "salad spinster", a girl who sits at home eating healthy dishes for one?

Well, spin this, Candy girls:

The sharrot scudders nights in the quastron now,

The dorlim slinks undeceded in the grost,

Appetency lights the corb of the guzzard now,

The ancient beveldric is otley lost.

Ogden Nash: 1 Daily Candy: 0

mnolan@thespec.com

905-526-4689