Word Coinage: Remasculate

Several years ago I was talking to my friend Colin and I used the word exoticize, as in, if I can remember correctly, "we always tend to exoticize other people's lives." Colin responded that he thought I had made up a new word. I told him that I couldn't have made up the word because he knew what I meant, but he argued that he knew because the word made so much sense, and not because he had heard it before. Anyway, on the way back to my office I checked out a couple of the dictionaries in the library at Champlain and couldn't find the word, and so I managed to half-convince myself that I had, in fact, made up the word. As it turns out I didn't make up the word because I later found it in the Oxford English Dictionary, so it was just one of those words that the more brilliant British use, and which I had probably read in a Martin Amis or Julian Barnes novel. It did get me thinking about making up words and how one gets credited with them - as in, you look up a word in the dictionary and after the definition they cite some source. I think I missed my chance with douche baggery, which I started using around three years ago - as in accusing some student of some immeasurable feat of douche baggery. However, I later saw many people use it and I realized that I had been plundered and not given the appropriate credit. However, I have no one to blame but myself. So, with that in mind, I'm going to lay claim to the word remasculate, which I used the other day in conversation. My definition of it is some gesture that a man's girlfriend or wife does to make up for something that they had done earlier to emasculate him. It's not the same as simply doing something nice to make up hurting someone's feelings, but rather an act which makes the man seem or feel more masculine. For example, she might have earlier, and within earshot of his or her friends, told the man not to bother carrying something (with the perception being - or at least the man's bruised ego-inspired perception being - that it should be carried by someone younger or stronger). Later she will make up for it, either consciously or unconsciously, by praising, again within earshot or his or her friends, her man's strength. Thus, she has remasculated him. There, I have officially laid claim to the word - or at least until I get the official letter from the solicitors of Amis or Barnes that they have been using the word for years and expect to be reimbursed.