I've been watching a lot of (very very bad) horror movies recently. I think we need a name for that phenomenon in film and television where (usually) minor characters doom themselves.

There's a few ways you can do it, and I don't want to lump all of them together. For instance, you can pretty much doom yourself to death in certain genres by using racial slurs, smoking, being a bully, being sexually promiscuous, or being the only african-american, but I don't want to count these surefire tickets to a violent death -- for no particular reason other than that there are only so many things I can cover at a time.

So the class of dooming statements I'm interested in is a subset of the general Fate-Tempting kind of doom. If you don't know what I'm talking about, that's because we don't have a word for it yet, but it comes up all the time. Since it would take longer to explain it, I'll just give some examples:

• Cop-movie sidekick shows our hero a picture of the boat he just bought (preferably with some life-affirming name like the SS Live-4-Ever [.1 Point]), where he will spend his retirement just as soon as they crack this case.
• War-movie sidekick reads a letter from his sweetheart back home and vows to marry her just as soon as his tour of duty is over.
• In the recent Angel finale, while all the other characters are resigned to the fact that their chances of survival are negligable, Wesley keeps making comments about how he has no intention of dying in the coming battle.
• Anyone in a horror movie says, "I'll be right back."
• Anyone in any movie says "I am invincible!"

Any of these, and a host of other similar statements pretty much guarantee that the character will die horribly, a little moral reminder that life is short and fickle, and God does not like it when you forget that he can put the smackdown on you at any time.

So, by now, you all know what I'm talking about, but, much like the goatee, it's annoyingly difficult to describe it without falling back on examples (G'head. Try to describe a goatee without touching or gesturing toward your chin). Maybe Hollywood is trying to pull a bit of Orwellian Newspeak, keeping us from realizing just how cliche the phenomenon is by not giving us a word for it.

That's why I've decided to take every opportunity that presents itself to use my own preferred term for the phenomenon. I dub it "Retirony." This is not a name I can actually take credit for inventing; it first appeared in The Simpsons, where Chief Wiggum explains that he will surely be fatally shot three days before retirement. Of course, Chief Wiggum places the emphasis on the impending retirement, while I place it on the statement. While this is a huge difference (The gods smote Kreon for his pride, not for having something to be proud about), I'm just going to ignore it, because I like the word.

Now, I'll admit that the road to coinage is not an easy one. Pretty much every time I use the word, "retirony," I then have to go on to explain what it means, so it ends up taking longer than if I'd just explained it in the first place. But it's a sacrifice I'm willing to make for the sake of future generations, who, between popping food cubes and enjoying syntho-lovin' with their robot sex machines (Shall I sing you to syntho-sleep/After the techno-lovin' [3 points]), will be able to use "retirony" unmolested.

And in case you think the movie world is too far afield from our own, The Word Detective informs me that as far back as the bygone days of World War II, pilots were frequently heard, before a dangerous mission, wistfully speculating on the day that they'd be able to go back home, marry their sweetheart, and settle down on a parcel of agricultural land out in Oklahoma.

Which is (maybe) why a pilot who didn't make it back could be said to have, "bought the farm."

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