Pressumption

pressumption (n.) — pre-SUMP-shun. The conviction, held by people who know perfectly well how lifts work, that an additional press communicates urgency to the building.

From press, and presumption, in the sense of a claim made without any grounds whatsoever. The word covers the whole family: the pedestrian crossing tapped nine times, the microwave door opened and shut to hurry it along, and the seatbelt tugged twice in the belief that this improves it.

The social form is where it becomes interesting. When somebody presses a button you have already pressed, you are being told, politely and without words, that your press is not trusted. Etiquette requires you to say nothing and look mildly at the doors. If you press it again after theirs, the situation escalates into a negotiation nobody can afford to acknowledge, and both parties leave the lift as strangers of a specific new kind. Lift manufacturers have known all this for decades and have been quietly humouring us. Many buttons register the first press and ignore everything after it, and a number of crossing buttons in various cities are connected to nothing whatsoever, on the reasoning that somebody who believes they have acted waits more calmly than somebody who knows they have not.

Usage: They stood in a shared pressumption for eleven floors, each having pressed the button twice, neither having mentioned it, both quietly certain the lift had come faster than it otherwise would.