There comes a time in everyone's life when they look around and wonder what all the stuff that they have gathered up over the course of their life actually is. Collecting and gathering are natural parts of life, possibly going back as far as our caveman days when gathering was a prerequisite to the very survival of our species. Obscure studies have shown that cavemen (and women) collected anything and everything they could find just in case that they might need it in order to survive one day. Stone age caves are generally found to be full of sand, rocks and bones and, on occasion graffiti, for this reason.
There is a strong possibly that theses habit are genetic and therefore inescapable and unavoidable.
In our modern lives these habits have taken on entirely new proportions. So much stuff is readily available that any modern gatherer struck down by this insidious habit will require a substantial capital outlay to be able to fulfill the urge. Many gatherers rent extra storage space and then proceed to fill it up as quickly as possible, almost like it's some type of perverse competition. Others simply move into a larger house with an extra bedroom or even better, a large garage. The garage has become the place of choice for most Americans to store their vast collections of junk in.
Yard sales should not to be viewed as an opportunity to lower junk volumes but rather as a method of thinning out the existing junk to make room for more selective and possibly equally as useless items. People who shop at yard sales are simply there to enhance their own junk collections and everyone who donate some of their junk to the Salvation Army or the Red Cross fall squarely into the same category. Simply put, junk gatherers never stop gathering.
Calling everything junk is tedious and perhaps slightly insulting to the gatherer. So what should all this high quality stuff-that-might-be needed-one-day be called?
Quampha.
An expressly word created, Quampha is best described as all the unnecessary things in your life.
Unnecessary? Who gets to decide what is unnecessary? A general and long-standing rule of thumb is that one man's junk is another man's treasure, which implies that he who does not own it (IE: not the collector) is the person who gets to label it as Quampha or treasure.
Usage: Quampha can be to describe almost any unnecessary items or things from the contents of your wife's handbag (which incidentally is what the word was first used to describe) to the overwhelming quantity of stationery in almost everyone's drawers in their office desk.
Further it can be used to described a particularly useless or lazy person, "Mike is pure Quampha today" or "I wish that when he was full of Quampha he would just stay at home" |
