Floris

 Scotland and the North of England got hit hard but Storm Floris merely dragged the skirts of its coat over us down here on the South Coast.

Floris- is it a girl's name or a boy's name? Neither and both. The internet tells me it's gender neutral and Dutch, derived from the Latin word Florens meaning "flourishing". I'm all for gender-neutral. And what a beautiful name it is!

Ghosting

 Ghosting- the new name for a practice as old as Linear "B".

I've ghosted and been ghosted. 

On occasion I've ghosted inadvertently, meaning I've put off replying and put off replying until it would be silly to pick up the thread.

I'm ghosting the person who annoyed me- but only after telling them that I wasn't going to exchange any more texts. And leaving the loophole that if they wanted to speak to me face to face they knew where to find me. This person dodged out of an earlier face-to-facer and that was pretty much the final straw.

I was always a reluctant correspondent.  Writing any kind of letter, email, text is a perfomance. You have to assume a mask adapted to the nature of your correspondent. The persona you present to a bank manager is very different to the one you present to a sweetheart- and for everone in between the two extremes you have to calculate just how intimate/comic/severe you can afford to be and choose your words accordingly. It's bloody hard work. Some of the same applies to face to face meetings but there you're relating to the person in the moment and words are not the only medium; there's body language, there's emotional temperature and what- for want of a better word- I'm going to call vibes. Face to face you can adjust, turn on a sixpence, improvise....