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Cosplay

I think it is wonderful that adults like to play dress-up, be it for sexual purposes or just for fun. In fact, I even think it’s fair that we have a word specifically to describe the practice.

But the word “cosplay” was thought up by a monkey. A STUPID monkey. One with a brain injury and an incurable lisp. Also, the monkey is tied to the back of a door and people are throwing lawn darts at it. POISON TIP lawn darts.

Seriously, though. Just call it dress-up, okay?  I know you think “dress-up” only applies to children dressing up as mommy and daddy, or as doctor and mommy, or as daddy and daddy (if they live in Massachusetts), but really is it any different when an adult does it? You’re still wearing an outfit so you may pretend to be someone or something else. Just because you may sometimes do this so that someone can pretend they’re also having sex with that frog, or that character from Final Fantasy, doesn’t change the basic premise.

It’s dress-up. You’re dressing up. But that’s okay. Nobody thinks you’re a loser any more than we already did.

Posted 23 September 2009 † Christopher § Neologisms § Sex § Sounds Stupid § Trying to be Cool ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: ,

Goosepimples

I have actually stabbed people for saying this word. No foolin’. Guy says “goosepimples”, I pull out my supercool switchblade and stab him in the penis and also his throat several times. You probably saw it in the news. It was classified as a hate crime because I hate this word so much.

Here’s the thing, for real now. GooseBUMPS are cute. When you touch someone, say, kiss them on the neck or ears, and they get goosebumps, it’s very very sexy. But when they say, “you give me goosepimples!” all I can think about is pimples. Not sexy.

If you have a habit of saying “goosepimples” I suggest you unlearn it before you ruin an otherwise wonderful date.

Posted 16 September 2009 † Christopher § Bad Context § Nouns ‡ Comments (0) °

Vegas, Baby!

Please observe the following phenomenon:

When a person is going to Las Vegas, or even when simply talking about Las Vegas, rather than saying

I’m going to Las Vegas.

they say

I’m going to Vegas, baby!

Did Las Vegas change its name to Vegas Baby? It is the only reasonable explanation. The alternative is that everyone I know has been jamming acorns up their nose. But if this were true, the US economy would have crumbled leaving millions unemployed and thousands of families living in sprawling tent villages outside our cities.

Surely Las Vegas changed their name and didn’t tell me. Not like I care. I’m never going to Vegas, Asshole.

Posted 13 September 2009 † Christopher § Expressions § Sounds Stupid § Trying to be Cool ‡ Comments (1) ° Tagged:

Chyron

This is a word you may not be familiar with, but you’ve surely seen one. If you watch news, particularly cable news, the chyron is the section in the lower third of the screen where the station shows names, headlines, a news feed, or a stock ticker. It’s basically all the graphics layed over whatever else is being shown. The chyron can be altered remotely by multiple parties.

It gets its name from the first software used to produce these graphics, which was originally spelled “Chiron”. The company that makes the software changed its own name in 1975 to Chyron Corporation, to capitalize on the popularity of the software, and on the timeless cool of the letter “Y”. Today, “chyron” is a thing, not just a product or a company.

This often happens for companies that invent a popular new product or service; the company name becomes a word, such as xerox, fedex, google, wifebeater, and spoon (named after Edvard Tobias van Spuhn, its designer — the 1940’s original is still available through the Design Within Reach catalogue — for $700 or kr3,478).

Yesterday I posted a word I love: “chyme“. If I apply the same reasoning, “chyron” should be a word I love, but it isn’t, because “chyron” is a stupid word for the thing it describes. “Chyron” sounds like a Buck Rogers brand, or at least Star Trek brand, of evil robot, not a video-graphics package. But now it’s too late, this thing is established and we’ll be hearing about chyrons for years. Given time, it will be verbed just like xerox and google and bukkake.

Posted 08 May 2009 † Christopher § Doesn't Match Meaning § Weird Stuff ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged:

Blowjob

This one has bugged me for years. We have many euphemisms for oral sex, which I won’t go into here, but only a few terms that are used in common parlance.  There are a fair number of sexy ways a person can describe fellatio, such as “suck your cock”, “suck you off”, “fuck my mouth”, “come down my throat”, and so on.  Even “head” is useful under certain circumstances.  But “blowjob” is still the most compact and convenient noun we have to describe this act, and it’s a TERRIBLE word.  First you have that opening “BL”, which sounds like someone throwing up, then that “J” which is never a sexy sound, and then the fact that when you give a blowjob, you don’t blow anything — you suck.  And to call it a JOB implies that it’s hard work.

If anything, it should be called “suckfun”.

Here’s a short unsourced explanation of the origin of this word from author/historian Charles Panati: The Origin of ‘Blow Job’.

Posted 06 May 2009 † Christopher § Nouns § Sex ‡ Comments (2) ° Tagged:

Oxymoron

Get rid of this word. Just get rid of it. We cannot have a word that ends in “moron” that has nothing to do with morons. Granted the “moron” in “oxymoron” comes from the same place as the “moron” in “moron” (the Greeks, those fuckers), and I’m sure at some point this word had a more generic meaning since it’s prefix “oxy-” (sharp) and root “moros” (stupid) combine to mean “pointedly foolish”, but now it simply means “contradiction in terms”. The meaning has lost its sense of place.

I realize we need a word for this concept, however. I propose keeping the pronunciation but dramatically altering the spelling. Examples include:

  • augsimorin
  • owksemaran
  • ockseemoren
  • ugsimorun
  • awxzymooroon

I realize these look much, much worse than “oxymoron” but this is the price you must pay to move language forward.

Posted 27 April 2009 † Christopher § Doesn't Match Meaning § Nouns § Sounds Stupid ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged:

Xtreme

Why is this horseshit still going on? Why is it necessary to be “extreme” anything, and at that, so extreme you forget how to spell? “Xtreme” isn’t extreme anymore, it’s boring and predictable.

We’ve talked about the “dirty little X” before. We love that X. But “Xtreme” just throws that X right in our faces, and when everybody does it, it gets oversaturated, and loses its cool. It becomes soggy, loathsome, and detestable.

There is a band called Xtreme. There are TWO off-road motorcycle companies named Xtreme (that I know of). Apparently the other motocross producers just make motorcycles for retirement communities (which would be extreme in its own way). Even the Extreme Motorcycle Company can’t keep up with these mavericks.

There is an endless list of companies with this name:

Xtreme RC Cars
X-Treme Rock Climbing
Xtreme Outdoor Karting
X-Treme Radio
Xtreme Notebooks
X-treme Geek
Xtreme Couture (That’s a MMA dojo, not a dress store)
Xtreme Gymnastics

I tip my hat to the creators of the X-Games, though. In 1995 the X-Games debuted in Providence, but they were called the “Extreme Games”. The following year, the name was changed to the X-Games. They totally skipped the intermediary “Xtreme Games” and got right to the point. I miss the winter mountain biking slalom, though. That was xtreme. Xtremely retarded.

Posted 24 April 2009 † Christopher § Getting Attention § Spelling § Weird Stuff ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: ,

Pataflafla

In drumming, in particular using the snare drum, there are these things called “rudiments”. A rudiment is a basic pattern one learns to build a kind of drumming vocabulary. There are several national and international drumming organizations that recognize the most important rudiments, and currently there are at least 40 accepted rudiments. These range from very basic rudiments, such as the “Single Stroke Roll” which is just an alternating left-right-left-right pattern, to much more complicated patterns.

What’s fascinating about rudiments is their history. They can be traced back to 16th and 17th century Swiss pikeman, who organized into a marching unit called a phalanx. Because the marching patterns were so complicated, and the pikes so cumbersome, commanders needed a way to communicate to the pikeman how to organize and what to do. They set up drummers to drum patterns that could be heard from a long distance to signal to the pikeman what to do.

A lot of the rudiments have names that supposedly sound a little like what they are, such as the flam, ratamacue, and paradiddle. But then there’s the “pataflafla” which just makes me embarrassed to even have to learn it. In order to lend credibility to this rudiment, and by extension all the rudiments, I hereby rename this rudiment the “Knuckle Breaker” because it feels that way when you’re trying to bang it out.

Posted 21 April 2009 † Christopher § Music § Sounds Stupid § Weird Stuff ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: ,

Ombudsman / Ombudsperson

This is what happens when the English language attempts to appropriate a Swedish word. You get one of the most ugly and cumbersome abominations ever to exit your mouth that didn’t involve Pabst Blue Ribbon and a bottle of spray cheese.

An ombudsman (or, in even more sickeningly politically-correct parlance, ombudsperson) is someone who acts as a liaison in resolving conflict or addressing complaints, typically between an individual and larger institutional body. I first learned what an ombudsman was from Bloom County, in which Opus took a position as the ombudsman at the local newspaper, the Bloom Picayune. There, he handled complaints from old ladies offended at the newspaper’s use of words like “snugglebunnies” or whatever.

I have myself used ombudspersons twice in my life: once in college to lodge a complaint against a professor, and once to lodge a complaint against my boss. It is a very useful position. And yet, we saddled it with this awful awful word.

I suggest replacing this word with an acronym to make it sound more “officially”. Any of these will do:

C.L. - “Complaints Liaison”
G.D.S. - “Grievance Dispersal Supervisor”
W.I.M. - “Whining Interface Moderator”
B.A. - “Bitch Abatement”

Posted 18 April 2009 † Christopher § Cumbersome § Nouns ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: ,

Palm

This one is personal. I have always pronounced the L in “palm”. But a few years ago my girlfriend at the time insisted that the L is not pronounced, that it should be pronounced like PAHM. This sounds completely ridiculous to me, but so far every dictionary I’ve encountered has said the same thing: she was right and I was wrong. I grew up in Florida, and spent many weekends at PALM Beach. I never in my life heard anyone say they were going to PAHM Beach, except perhaps for the Kennedy’s.

Also maddening is that both the part of the hand and the variety of plant come from the same Latin root, palma, and after making its way through Old French and Old English, it came out just palm. So at some point in the past people definitely did pronounce that L. So why do I do it, but nobody else does? Am I some kind of half-wit throwback? I am from Florida, after all.

Posted 16 April 2009 † Christopher § Nouns § Personal § Pronunciation ‡ Comments (1) ° Tagged:

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