hackronyms

sorry, excuse me

no, you're fine

yeah, no

you're good

thanks, yeah, thank you

you're fine

sorry, no, I thought . . .

no, yeah, you're good

appreciate that

like, why wouldn't you be good?

yeah, no

it's all good, life is good

I hear ya

so . . .

"fine"

so fine; there was a song

before my time

c'mon, you've heard it, catchy

"doo-lang, doo-lang"

that's it!

"he's so fine"

the Chiffons

yes! yes!

sexy

catchy

so fine

FINE

hunh?

frustrated insecure needy enraged

hunh, what?

F-I-N-E

oh, I get it, clever

like fucked-up insolvent neurotic effete

two can play this game

fine

fraudulent intolerant nasty excoriating

oooh

friendly innocent naive enthusiastic

pshaw

no, yeah

yeah, no

yeah

yeah

yeah, yeah, yeah

#change

That'll be $4.59.
Here's a five.
See the sign? We need exact change. Or cc or dc.
What's cc or dc?
Credit card or debit card.
I don't got none of that.
How much for three donuts, not four?
There's people waiting in line.
I have a mask on, calm down.
I ain't talkin' 'bout no mask. Exact change.
What about three?
Three what?
Donuts.
$3.29.
These are weird-ass prices, yo.
Which is it?
Which is what?
Three or four donuts?
How about five for five dollars.
Sorry. Nope. I told you, people are in line.
And I told you, I got a mask.
We're not talking about that. I told you, c'mon. Next!
Next? What?
Exact change, man.
Why exact change?
Coin shortage.
I don't believe that fake news.
That's what the sign say.
I can read. The mask ain't covering my fuckin eyes.
You don't gotta talk like that.
Like what?
Like that. Next.
Here. Just take the five. I don't need no change. Just take it. Gimme my damn cinnamon donuts.
I don't have no change. I told you.
Any.
Any what?
Any change. You don't have any change.
Correct. No change.
But you do. I just saw it in the drawer. Don't lie about it.
I ain't lying. Exact change.
Take the fuckin five. Here.
Next.
Have a fuckin nice day.
Next.
 

stock phrase

if you recall

our stock

phrase

such as it was

three ancient words

wrapped around

our twisted veins

mad crazy

seared

 into a Tuesday

moon

bright blood

bloomed in the cut

one too many moorings

ripped from our secret heart

a black pearl

labeled

‘love’

word of the day

Today, Merriam-Webster selected "youthquake" as its Word of the Day:

(Is "Word of the Day" a proprietary term?)

Here's what Merriam-Webster posted:

youthquake

June 08, 2015

noun

\YOOTH-kwayk\

Definition

: a shift in cultural norms influenced by the values, tastes, and mores of young people

. . . which prompts these from me:

oldquake: Baby Boomers' anxiety over their retirement accounts 

slimquake: distress over the amount of one's caloric intake

heftquake: Ibid.

sexquake: performance anxiety

WASPquake: can you wear white pants after Labor Day?

cakequake: Op. cit.  

alcquake: the morning after

billquake: You got this? No? Really? 

agnostiquake: OMG. What if there really is a hell?

datequake: What if she/he/? doesn't like me, or vice versa?

ratequake: The Federal Reserve -- and Wall Street's biggest fear

votequake: The seismic shock to American democracy if more than 80% of eligible voters actually, well, voted

selfies, belfies, and soulfies

One of the great virtues of American English is that it has served as a lovely, anarchic breeding ground for new words, for all sorts of coinages and neologisms. Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses of slang. We're not like the French, waiting for an academy to grant approval to our local, handcrafted, artisanal, non-GMO, and ferociously democratic wordsmithing.

"Selfie" is but one example, illustrating the modern solipsistic passion for pictures of one's self, or of one's orbit of selfdom. By extension, the New York Times tells us this week, "belfies" are self-administered photos of one's behind. Posterior selfies. Who knew? (Not me.)

Which gets me thinking. Try these on for size. And feel free to chime in with your own inventions.

soulfies -- Snapshots of the current state of your soul.

barfies -- Instagrams of pub crawling. Can be used for calling in sick the next day.

aarfies -- Adorable dog images.

rolfies -- Photos of successful holistic soft-tissue release. (Cf. rolfing. Replaces old-fashioned smiley-face emoji.)

nullfies -- Blanks. Nothing. Zilch. Nothing on the screen, but takes up memory anyway. (A sly comment on nihilism. Then again, maybe not.)

oughties -- The pictures you really should have displayed, instead of the ones you regrettably did display.

Your turn, dear reader.


 

resolutionaries

Are you a resolutionary?

(Got the neologism from the Washington Post.)

I tend not to be a resolutionary.

But we've gone over this.

Resolutely.

nocturnal chronognosia

I wake up nightly to perform human-wastewater-relief duties (HWRD). (With that acronym, you can tell I do a lot of technical editing in the environmental field.) Typically two to three times per night. Could be more, could be less. Rare not to obey nature's mandates at least once nightly. But here's the strange thing. I walk into the bathroom with a guess in my head as to what time it is. Then I look up at the clock. (If I am extremely tired or have retired very late, I just don't look at the clock. It would freak me out too much to see how little I have slept.) Get this: invariably my guess of the time is accurate to within a few minutes! Oh, sometimes I'm off, maybe even by as much as an hour, but that's rare.

I have termed this phenomenon nocturnal chronognosia.

(Do I have the same uncanny ability during the day? Do I have diurnal chronognosia? I'd have to forgo the wearing or consulting of wristwatches, etc. to find out. Somehow diurnal chronognosia just does not seem as interesting.)

Hmmmmmmmmmmm.

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

A Penny for Your Thoughts, Redux

Two days in a row I walked by a penny on the sidewalk. I did not pick it up. Time was, out of a sense of good sense (and cents) and savings, one would pick up a penny, even if for good luck. I did not bother. This disappoints me. Not that I harbor sentimental illusions about how much I am missing out on, how much my savings potential is diminished. (On that note, I am diligent. I have a large change jar, sometimes two. The resultant savings have paid for trips. I have also started a savings envelope, to which I contribute sometimes more than once a day: for fun and emergencies. I highly recommend these pecuniary practices.) Would I stoop to retrieve a dollar bill? Yes. But my inaction reflects a mindset, a way of thinking that got us into this economic morass. Many would pass up a dollar, I'd wager (though wagering is against the spirit of saving). Would they sneeze at a five or a ten? Walking on the sidewalk, when I was in first grade or so, I found a five-dollar bill, on the grass, moored there waiting for me on a windy day, if memory serves. What a thrill! What would that translate to in today's dollars, or euros? There are unwritten conventions, or used to be, regarding such findings. If you are in a hallway of a building and you find, say, a benjamin, are you honor-bound to inquire if anyone has lost one? Is that naive? What do you do next: invite claimants to recite the serial number? Funny thing is, I don't know if the penny is still there, waiting. Maybe it's a 1909 S VDB penny.

Or-chasm

or - chasm - n. The immeasurable distance between one choice and another.

Or, with its grammar of gestation. Or, with its suggestive reservoir of participles of posing; its gerunds of guessing; its infinitives of "to do this" or "to do that." Or, the signature nomenclature of choice and mystery.

But is it possible for the divide between "either" and "or" to be exciting? I don't know. Anxiety-producing, yes, but exciting? Anyway, ask Soren Kierkegaard, author of "Either/Or." (Kierkegaard didn't seem to be that big on pleasure, though, did he?)


For or-chasm, picture Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken," a paean to the possibilities of choice.


Or William Carlos Williams's "The Red Wheelbarrow," with its potently resonating phrase "so much depends." (Of course, when pondering either or-chasms so much depends on lots and lots of things, eh?)

Play nice now. You're on your own.
Copyright © 2007 The Laughorist and Pawlie Kokonuts

Boozerangs and Other Hangovers

Boozerang, n. The boomeranglike negative effects of alcohol consumption.

Of course, that's what a hangover is, isn't it? A fatal-feeling slice back into the orbital lobe of one's consciousness:
what did I do, what did I say? whom did I offend? Except that the boozerang's path sometimes sweeps far and wide, swirling into the paths of other memories, other psyches, other souls. There's no known quick cure for this. Time, wishful thinking, and the hope that one's boozerang-flooded memory errs -- those are some of the healing ingredients. And add a dash of resolve that this will never happen again.

Maybe it's a cheap shot to launch such a headache-inducing post on the day after St. Patrick's Day, so let's cast a much wider net:

No doubt, there are other hangovers besides my newly coined boozerang. We all tend to contend with these on The Day After The Day Before:

• the hangover of sober memory (did I really do that? how could I have said that?)

• the regret of squandered opportunity (if I only had spent my time and energy doing...)

• the fatalism of loss (I didn't then, so I can't ever)

• the corrosion of resentment (the parenthetical, if not hypothetical, prison of past poison)

• the return to one's senses (I thought it was so great, now I'm not so sure...)

And the cure for all these?


Exalt in the day;

surrender to the moment, awash in gratitude,

celebrating the is-ness of it all,

sung with the cardinal and the finch,

the silent cat and the snoozing dog,

the meandering cloud and lazy sun,

the melting ice and budding branch.


(The term "boozerang" and its definition, © copyright 2007 by The Laughorist.)

The Says-pool

I heard a radio commercial this morning referring to the Internet as the "information superhighway."

Whew, I hadn't heard that one in a long time.

I never felt that metaphor worked. It is typically invoked by advertisers promising high-speed Internet service, allowing users to drive up the information ramp quickly, yadda-yadda.

I'm reminded of something Henry David Thoreau wrote:

"We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate."

What is a good metaphor for the Internet?

I think it's more like a river, stream, or ocean.

Or maybe a gigantic pool. Yeah, that's it.

*The says-pool.

(Of course, you might argue for sees-pool, seize-pool, or cease-and-desist-pool. But I like the fact that says-pool captures two elements of the Internet: our wading in (or diving in) to a great sea of Something-or-other interlinked like that old game of Telephone, driven by "he said-she said-he said-she said-they said-it said" ad infinitum. That said, let me note that in real life a Google search of my real name nets thousands upon thousands of entries, and maybe as many as 90% are wrong in their attribution. Almost right, but not quite. And it's all a matter of the rippling effects of misinformation upon misinformation, which can never be corrected or amended.)

Laugh. Or....

Else.

* The coinage "says-pool" is copyright 2007 by The Laughorist, Pawlie Kokonuts, and his antecedents, precedents, and malcontents.