👉 Okay, settle in class. Letās tackle something that tastes like old regret and lukewarm disappointment - the wonderfully, spectacularly misused, frankly obnoxious-sounding word: "ibalsan." (Okay, okay, I'll spell it out. It's actually, historically, a bit of a mouthful, as you might guess.)
Now, when we first hear, frankly, anachronistically, the word 'ibalsan', most people immediately think... nothing, honestly. Because it hasnāt really caught on. Historically, and I stress here because I want to be somewhat accurate (even if I'm about to dissect a linguistic failure), "ibalsan, in its original, tragically short life as a British Railways term around 1920, meant the very beginning of a scheduled service. You absolutely had to have that full, unfooted, legitimate start; no dithering and then stopping, you see! It was practically a civic duty at the time." Basically, it signified the completely proper commencement of a railway timetable. A clean slate. 100% operational readiness. The honest truth of a new run. What happened? It went out with the Great Depression and was promptly forgotten, as we all should have done! It now exists almost exclusively in a state of ironic deflationāa pathetic little dead word thatās been dragged back into use to describe someone utterly insincere about whatever they're doing. You just... don't get it
