But our language is not perfect. Perhaps not all circumstances are covered, and once I tried to invent a word to fill one tiny niche I felt I discerned in the lexicon. There seemed no word for the grey water-trail left on the kitchen floor by children who come in from the snow without taking off their wellingtons. So I came up with "drimmens", which seemed appropriately glum and grim and vaguely Scots, and I used it in articles for a while. But no one took it up, and, unlike the grislier example of self-mutilation, it never made it to the OED, nor to the Texan million list. I sulk still.