shroomer
From baseheads and junkies to stoners and schmeckers, there are many informal terms to describe the users of illegal drugs. A relatively new one is shroomer: this is a person who uses hallucinogenic ('magic') mushrooms to get their kicks. Shroomer comes from shroom, which is short for mushroom, and is first recorded in US sources in the 1980s. In a more innocent vein, shroomer can also be used to describe a person who gathers wild mushrooms for food.

LARPing
An acronym from Live Action Role Playing. Those involved in LARPing, known as LARPers, take on a role of a character in a fantasy scenario, typically a quasi-medieval one, dress up in costumes, and act the fantasy out. As a word, LARPing is first recorded in the early 1990s, but the activity is closely related to the fantasy role-playing game 'dungeons and dragons' (popular in the 1970s and 1980s), although this was originally played with pen and paper and miniature figures.

fedge
A 'living fence' made out of willow, bamboo, or similar plants. The term, a blend of fence and hedge, is new, but the idea of making a fence or boundary out of growing plants has been around for centuries - many fields in England are still surrounded by quickset hedges (from quick in its original sense 'alive, living') which have been formed from hawthorn and other bushes.

Googlewhacking
If you've got access to the Net and a spare hour or several on your hands, why not try this? It's the game of entering a two-word search into the Google search engine and trying to get just a single 'hit' in return (usually searches come up with thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of results). The single web page so found is called a Googlewhack: recent Googlewhacks listed on a dedicated website include musclebound okapi and codswallop usurps. The Google part of Googlewhacking is self-explanatory, while the second element is probably a pun on whack ('strike something forcefully' or 'a forceful hit') and whack off, a slang phrase meaning 'masturbate'.

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