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’.
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 pedophiles), 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 we can’t make all those poor little high school morons self-conscious.
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.
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 while in battle. 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.
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, who was harassing me, and once to lodge a complaint against my boss, who was a twat. 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”
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.
When the English language was created by God (around 4,000) years ago, He never meant for words like this to infect His perfect creation, which is in the image of His own language. But then in the 16th century, some lame-o needed attention and started talking about “peccadillos” when “flaws” or “small sins” would work just as well without taking up so much of our time listening to it. “Peccadillos” is merely the random belching of the vapors of a small mind that believes itself to be a large mind. And I refuse to even let the word “peccadillos” outside the protective barrier of double-quotes. Come to think of it, I should be double or triple-bagging for this filthy whore of a word, “”"peccadillos”"”.
That will protect me from word herpes.
I have posted these together because they both suffer the same problem: poets love them. And not just hack poets, either. Respectable, even professional poets spew “velveteen” like it was “gossamer”. I have no idea what the poetic obsession with these words are. Velvet is a fabric. At one point, it was a beautiful, luxurious, expensive fabric. But now that it can be produced by machine, using synthetic materials, and that it can be PAINTED ON, it’s just shit like everything else. If you own anything made of velvet that wasn’t created before, say, the Spanish Civil War, you may find wiping your baby’s ass is a better use for it.
And “velveteen”? That’s also a fabric…an IMITATION of velvet! Isn’t the world already burdened with a enough SUCK?
Yet poets hang on to these words as if they still have any relevance or beauty.
At least we can take consolation in the fact that “velvet” and “veleveteen” are strikingly similar to “Velveeta”. So every time you read a poem that uses the words “velvet” or “velveteen”, say “Velveeta” instead, and give the poet what he/she deserves. Imitation CHEESE.
Remiss is a needy needy word, at least in modern spoken English. I’m sure at some point years ago people actually used “remiss” on its own, actually using it to describe a state of carelessness or negligence. In fact, this definition lives on in its very useful offspring, remission.
But today, people do not say “remiss” without also saying “I would be … if I didn’t” as in “I would be remiss if I didn’t…”. Remiss needs SIX other words to survive. And there are many perfectly good substitutes that can be used almost interchangeably:
- negligent
- derelict
- thoughtless
- careless
“Remiss” is on life support. It has lost all or most of its meaning and is only kept alive by the will of the words that surround it. I say it is time to let it go.
This one almost goes without saying. “Literally” is quite literally the most bastardized word in the English language. It literally makes me vomit. You will literally grow a penis out of your face and die if you say it.
You see what’s going on here? The real meaning of “literally” has been destroyed. Sometimes, this is a wonderful thing. Words need to evolve and change as society evolves and changes. But the real meaning of “literally” is being pummeled by ignorami, who seek to turn it into a glorified “certainly”.
This word has been around a long time, too. It’s etymology has the same Latin root as “letter”, and its meaning — “taking words in their natural meaning” — has been the same for hundreds and hundreds of years. And now, in literally the time it takes for a fart to travel from your asshole to your face, it has been destroyed.
I wouldn’t be so bothered if there was another word to use in its place, but I haven’t been able to find one. When a word is both useful and unique, the destruction of its meaning can actually destroy the very idea it represents. With no literal meaning, words can mean whatever we want them to mean. The death of “literally” is literally the death of language, and by extension, the death of thought.
Damn you postmodernism! I am literally farting with anger!
