vocab

From “The Joys of Yiddish” by Leo Rosten:

To help you distinguish kvitch from kvetch from krechtz (a salubrious set of niceties) I offer these observations:

You can kvitch sedately, charmingly, out of happiness; to kvetch is always negative, bilious, complaining; and to krechtz is to utter grating noises of physical discomfort or spiritual woe.

Kvitching may be hard on the ears, but kvetching is hard on the nerves. As for krechtzing, it should be reserved for a hospital room.

Some families produce personality types who are adept, even effusive, in their kvitching; other families specialize in kvetching — communal grousings drenched in self-pity; and some krechtz so loudly and so often that they sound like a convention of hypochondriacs.

If you take the trouble to familiarize yourself with the nuances of kvitching, kvetching, and krechtzing, you may zestfully add them to your arsenal of exclamatory locutions. Connoisseurs should enlist them for the relief of English words that are becoming exhausted from overwork.

rigamarole

I typed the word “rigamarole” into an email the other day and got one of those red squiggly lines underneath telling me it was misspelled.

That’s interesting, I thought, because I’m pretty sure that’s a bullshit made-up word. [Turns out it’s not. It’s a word with a long history. – ed] [There is no editor.]

So I right-clicked on the word to find out how my computer thought it should be spelled and found out the all-knowing spellcheck god wanted me to type “rigmarole” instead.

Well. I’m not doing that. Because that’s just flat-out *wrong.* Even though all my dictionaries say I’m wrong, this is one time I’m not going to budge. It’s been “rigamarole” all my life and nobody’s going to gaslight me into changing it to “rigmarole” now. It’s the totally stupid hill I’m willing to die on.

abashed

I had to look up the word “unabashed” today.  My dictionary told me the definition of “unabashed” was “not abashed,” which is Webster’s way of saying, “look up the word ‘abash,’ you dolt.”

Abash: to destroy the self-possession or self-confidence of; disconcert; see embarrass

So not only was Webster’s telling me to look up “abash,” they were trolling me, too.

Well-played, Webster’s.  Well-played.

persiflage

PERSIFLAGE (PER suh flazh)

from the French persifler, “to banter”

Light banter; idle, bantering talk; a frivolous style of treating a subject – The New Century Dictionary 1927

A light, flippant style – Funk & Wagnalls Practical Standard Dictionary 1942

852. RIDICULE, derision, irrision, raillery, mockery, banter, persiflage, bandinage, twit, chaff; quiz, quizzing etc. v.: joke, jest; asteism; irony, sarcasm; sardonic grin or smile, snicker or snigger, smirk, grin, leer, fleer; scoffing etc. – Roget’s New International Thesaurus 1956

‘whistle-talk’. Irresponsible talk, of which the hearer is to make what he can without the right to suppose that the speaker means what he seems to say; the treating of serious things as trifles and of trifles as serious. ‘Talking with one’s tongue in one’s cheek’ may serve as a parallel. Hannah more, quoted in the OED, describes French p.l as ‘the cold compound of irony, irreligion, selfishness, and sneer’. Frivolity and levity, combined with gentle ‘leg-pulling’, are perhaps rather the ingredients of the compound as now conceived, with airy as its stock adjective. Yeats said of it that it was ‘the only speech of educated men that expresses a deliberate enjoyment of words. … Such as it is, all our comedies are made out of it.’ – Fowler’s Modern English Usage, 2nd Edition 1965

frivolous or lightly derisive talk or manner of treating a subject – Webster’s 7th New Collegiate Dictionary 1969

persiflage *bandiage, raillery bantering or banter, chaffing or chaff: ridiculing or ridicule, twitting, deriding or derision – Webster’s New Dictionary of Synonyms 1973

882. BANTER, bandiage, persiflage, pleasantry, fooling, fooling around, kidding or kidding around, raillery, rallying, sport, good-natured banter, harmless teasing; ridicule 967; chaff, twit, jest, joke, jape, josh; jive; exchange, give-and-take – Roget’s 4th International Thesaurus 1977

indifference

Indifference to what words actually say; willingness to accept a vapid truism as a useful, even revelatory concept; carelessness about where a supposed quotation comes from – that’s all part of what I like least about the Internet. A “blah blah blah, who cares, information is what I want it to be” attitude – a lazy-mindedness that degrades both language and thought.
     – Ursula K. LeGuin

vape? not!

I don’t have an opinion one way or another about the practice of “vaping.” Huff and puff on whatever gets you off, it’s all the same to me. But “vape” is a dumb word. That, I have a definite opinion about. I won’t point at or ridicule you if you vape, but I will chortle and sneer with the utmost derision if you use the word “vape” like it’s a cool thing. It’s not. Come up with a different word. That one stinks.

waddaya call

Until the 1970s, the American faux spouse was too rare and taboo to even try to track. In 1980, the United States Census Bureau made its first attempt at naming these creatures in order to count them. It really outdid itself lexicographically: ‘person of opposite sex sharing living quarters,’ abbreviated to POSSLQ and pronounced ‘possle cue.’ The CBS commentator Charles Osgood had his way with the acronym, publishing a poem riffing John Donne’s ‘The Bait.’

     You live with me, and I with you,
     And you will be my POSSLQ.
     I’ll be your friend and so much more;
     That’s what a POSSLQ is for.

— “Unmarried Spouses Have a Way With Words, NY Times

 

fdsafdsafd

search on term fdsafI wanted to do an advanced google search this morning. I was looking for a particular phrase on a particular web site, but the only way I know of to do that is to do a plain old vanilla search from the main google page, then scroll to the bottom, then click on the ‘advanced search’ option.

So I keyed in ‘fdsafdsafd’ by drumming the fingers of my left hand across home row a couple times, just to fill the search box, and hit return. Damned if I didn’t get 20,200 results. There’s even a video.

Even better, if you type ‘fdsafdsafd’ very slowly, pausing between each key, the results change with each new key stroke. Try it. It’s like discovering a whole new world where all they speak is gibberish.

pesto pasta

I sure like saying “pesto pasta.” I’ll bet you would, too, if you gave it a try. Go ahead, try it: “Pesto pasta.” See how much fun?

Pesto pasta
Pesto pasta
Pesto pasta

Man, I could say that all day long, or until I feel like saying “spackle.” Spackle spackle spackle spackle spackle.

Here’s another fun one: Try saying “toy boat” over and over as fast as you can.

Toy boat
Toy boat
Toy boat
Toy boat
Toy boat

You couldn’t say it more than three times without changing it to “toy boit,” could you?

I once new a woman named Cheryl Shimmel. I tormented her by turning her name into a tongue-twister and repeating it every day for weeks until she wanted to strangle me: “Cheryl Shimmel sits in shirt sleeves schlupping sloppy Slurpees.”

We named our oldest cat “Bonkers,” but we hardly ever call him that. Among other nicknames, such as “Bonky Boy” and “Bonky Moon,” we very often call him “Bonkers Bonkers Bonkers.” If you ever call him that, you have to say it real fast in a gruff tone of voice, as if you’re about to tickle a very small child.

This is the kind of drivel you get when I’ve been up since four-thirty drinking coffee and eating pie for breakfast. You’re welcome. Have a nice day.

How to see Milwaukee on just $500 a day – Part 2

image of Art Smart's Dart Mart in Milwaukee WIWe went to Milwaukee to see a taping of one of our favorite radio shows, Says You! and then we almost didn’t make it to the show! It was an evening taping but we left Madison in the morning and got to Milwaukee around noon so we could have a wander around town. Then we went back to our room to clean up and catch a short nap. When we were ready to go, I called for a taxi to pick us up.

The driver called me from the curb outside the door of the inn when he got there and I very nearly didn’t answer because he had a New York phone number, so I assumed he was a telemarketer. I only decided to pick up so I could mess with him.

“Yessss?” I answered.

“Dave?”

That old dodge: Using my first name to get me to stay on the line. “Yessss?”

Pause. “Did you call a cab?”

“Oh! Yes, yes I did! Hang on, we’ll be right down!”

Then, as we stepped out the elevator into the lobby, a couple dressed to nines were looking out the window and saying something like, “I don’t know how he got here so quickly. Maybe it’s not ours.” But they went out anyway and stopped short of getting into the cab when we followed them as closely as a shadow all the way to the curb.

“Did you call a cab, too?” the woman asked me.

“Yes, I did,” I answered as My Darling B stuck her head in the door to make sure it was, in fact, our cab. It was. As I climbed in, B asked the driver to take us to the Helen Bader Theater on the UW-Milwaukee Campus, and then gave him the address: 2419 E. Kenwood Boulevard. “Right, right,” he said, and sped us to a faraway neighborhood of the city.

Let me just interrupt here to remind the reader that the only times we’ve been to Milwaukee before this have been on guided tours, or to pick someone up from the airport. We don’t know any of the streets or neighborhoods, but we assumed our driver did, and when he said, “Right, right,” and nodded, I don’t think we went out on a limb when we assumed he knew exactly where the Helen Bader theater was. Certainly, we expected him to know where the campus of the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee was.

So when he dropped us off at the intersection of what looked like a shopping district, we didn’t say, “Where the hell are we?” We assumed he’d dropped us off maybe around the corner from the theater and we only had to walk to the corner and we’d see it. Call me foolishly naive, I deserve it. When we walked down to the corner to get our bearings, though, we discovered that the driver had dropped us off on Kenilworth Street, not Kenwood Boulevard! I ran back to the taxi with B yelling, “Stop him! Stop him!” behind me. Thank dog it took him so long to get his dispatcher on the phone.

On the upside, he didn’t charge us for the ride to the correct address, and we got there in plenty of time.

I was trying to describe Says You! to a friend the other day and rather ironically found myself at a loss for words. Ironic, because Says You! is, as the show’s host, Richard Sher, describes it, a game of words played by two teams. It’s alrways played in five rounds, each with its own peculiar quirk. They played one of my favorite rounds last night, a game I can play without making my brain explode. Richard Sher gives the name of an actor and asks a panelist to guess the movie he’s thinking of. It’s usually an almost unknown actor in a supporting role. With just one name, the guess is at best wild, of course, although sometimes they actually get it on the first try. If so, ten points! If not, another actor’s name gets added to the list, this one a little more well-known than the first.

With the choices narrowed down a bit it’s not a coin toss any more, but still just barely an educated guess. Sometimes Richard will go with the most popular movie featuring the actors in question, sometimes the most recent, but sometimes he’ll go for the obscure title. You never know. The last name added to the list is a giveaway, the name of whoever got star billing, and when it gets that far its announcement is followed by a lot of facepalming and oh-I-shoulda-got-that groaning.

Two of the rounds are Bluffing Rounds: the host gives one team a word so obscure that it sounds as though he made it up on the spot. The words they used the other night, for instance, were “callithump” and “corf.” Don’t ask me what they mean; I forgot already. Each of the team members gets a card, but only one of the cards has the definition of the word on it; the other two cards say, “Please Bluff.” Those two team members try to make up a definition that sounds plausible enough to fool the other team into picking one of the made-up definitions.

There’s always a musical guest to play a song during the introductions, and to provide a musical interlude during the bluffing rounds, to give the panelists enough time to come up with a good bluff. The musical guest was probably the most delightful surprise of the evening: they were The Squeezettes, the power-polka band we just happened to see last month at the Monroe Cheese Fest. I described them then as an all-girl accordion band but there was a guy drumming and another guy playing a sousaphone, so obviously I wasn’t paying close attention. And although there are three women playing accordion, calling them an all-girl accordion band doesn’t do them justice. They describe their style as “power polka,” which comes much closer to capturing the feel of their art. Have you ever thought of “Wooly Booly” as a polka? Me, neither, but to hear them belt it out is to experience a whole new level of polka that I frankly wouldn’t have thought possible. I didn’t hesitate to buy a CD from the guy selling them in the lobby.

There was just one thing, and I mean only one thing, I would have changed about the evening: If I’d known the six people behind us were going to jabber and shout through the whole performance, I would’ve eaten a brick of cheese right before we were ushered in. I’ll have to keep one in my man purse from now on for emergencies.