In this case, a word. Someone should invent a word for when someone is more famous to you than their empiric famosity quotient should yield. My ur-example is Julian Barnes. He’s not necessarily famous on the street in the United States. Probably, when you get down to it, not famous on the street in London. But if x represents a numeric value of his fame, when I saw him walking past my desk at Morning Edition in Washington DC, I experienced x as some sort of integrated equation. Or a cube of x. See? Math doesn’t do it justice.

This is coming up because I realized that for every word there is or should be an antonym. If this word existed, so too would its inverse. Which is when you mention someone’s name in Los Angeles and it’s supposed to mean something to the other person but your sense of the mentioned person’s fame and the mentioned person’s actual fame are diverse, and the actual value is smaller. Thus, an invention of a word for someone being famous-to-you would also yield a word for someone being not-famous-to-you. And if you heard that second word you would know to back away slowly from its speaker.