I did a Google search and found it used elsewhere, so I can’t claim originality, but I’d like to nominate “wonkified” for official adoption as a word in the English language. I’m sure that once whoever is responsible for adjudicating these things accepts the wisdom of my suggestion, people will find a number of valid uses for the word, but my recognition of this shocking linguistic lacking came about as a result of my use of Microsoft Windows.

I’ve found that if I leave Windows open for too long without rebooting and, not necessarily simultaneously, use too many programs over that time, things start randomly malfunctioning. There doesn’t seem to be any way to identify what constitutes “too long” or “too many.”

It’s also not possible to predict what will go wrong. Sometimes programs hang or crash without warning. Sometimes my Internet connection stops connecting. Sometimes things slow down intolerably. Sometimes, after I’ve done a lot of work and try to save a file, I get a message telling me that I can’t save the file because my disk is full, despite the fact that there’s oodles of free space on the disk. And sometimes multiple things go wrong. In short, things just start to go wonky. Hence the need for the word “wonkified,” as in, “Windows has become wonkified. I guess it’s time to reboot.”