Afterdamp

I’ve been playing The Dictionary Game (who knew it had another name?) for years; it’s second only to charades in the Pantheon of party games in my book.

My friend Stephen Southall sent me a recipe for granola after Christmas and the final phase of the preparation was titled Afterdamp, a reference to a word that featured in a game we played more than 25 years ago in which the definition of note was “the time after the moistening and before the drying off.”

Beyond its usefulness in the sexual arena, afterdamp turns out to be the perfect word to describe the phase after granola comes out of the oven and before it is bottled.

Indeed I’d forgotten that afterdamp actually has a real meaning, concerned with mining and off-gassing; in my mind, the fictional definition has superseded the real one.

Surely there must be a word for that.