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Reichen Lehmkuhl, the Amazing Race winner and aspiring actor who managed to hush all the naysayers with his laudable, recent turn on Days of Our Lives as a bartending amateur detective hot on the trail of a missing cellphone, is once again making self-induced headlines with comments he made regarding the recent coming out of How I Met Your Mother's Neil Patrick Harris—coining a new word in the process:

Doogie Howser wasn't outed, he was "lanced." That's a new term to describe celebrities who have been forced to reveal they're gay, said Reichen Lehmkuhl, boyfriend of 'N Sync star Lance Bass.

"It's to be outed by someone in the public media and to a celebrity, and Neil Patrick Harris, I understand, has been `lanced,'" Lehmkuhl told AP Radio News in a recent interview. The term was coined, he said, after Bass revealed earlier this year that he is gay.

Should Reichen's attempt at turning his more famous boyfriend's name into a lower-case, media buzzword actually catch on, it could well be Lance Bass who ultimately suffers, the public's perception of the former, non-essential *NSYNCer becoming forever linked to the generic shorthand for "famous for being smoked out of the closet." Still, "lanced" does have a catchy succinctness to it, and we wouldn't be surprised if an entirely new vocabulary based upon the Great Celebrity Outings of 2006 were to follow suit, including "knighted" (announcing one's sexual preference as a direct result of an on-set choking or similar, violent attack), "doogied" (putting one's itchy-trigger-fingered publicist in his place with an unabashed rejection of his gay denials), and, not to leave out the man who started it all, the verb "to reichen," i.e. encouraging one's celebrity boyfriend to come out, then riding the free publicity for every photo-op, soundbite and self-promotional opportunity that it's worth.