It and Essence

Posted on June 2nd 2014

On Language: Of Oofos and Ooparts

By Alex Linder

[ The following is from a forum thread posting. ]

As the purpose of writing is to mock; to relieve the tedium of life with attacks on the moronic -- and as the purpose of neologism is to inspire actual mentation in the dull coasters, so I coined, upon a time, the pronunciation oofo, as a newing of the standard you-eff-ohh. Oofo sounds dumb. The concept of UFOs is not dumb, but the fact that thousands upon thousands of people have seen UFOs, yet not a single bit of metal from one has been collected, that not a single one of the droolards saw fit to pocket a brochure on the way out, confirms that, per usual, the prosaic reality is merely that something stupid is going on, namely the mass-production of hallucinations in line with a media depiction.

As Jesus would say, if he ever existed or returned, it's never the nose. Those little green men never go for the nostril; nay, with their ready probes they always and always make a beeline for the anus. The average oofo believer, were he abducted, would feel ashamed and chagrined, deeply embarrassed, if, on his return (read: awakening, coming to, or undrunkening) he had to report to the waiting world and representatives of certain disreputable, Florida-based large-format viewspapers that while he'd duly been seized and upbeamed, inspected and caliperated, yet he retained his rectal integrity. The thing is not done. It is unseemly. Form must be followed, even in alien abductions.

But we hop over something interesting, and as ours is an endeavor to discover the inner meat and meaning of language, let's track back. If neologism is the term for a new coinage, then what is the term for a new pronunciation? Is there one? Faith, I know not. I wonder only.

Returning to our subject, if there can be unidentified objects in the air...then surely there can be unidentified objects on the ground. Or in the ground! That's where we begin...

1) oopart -



Think not oo-part but oop-art, to remember. Oop-art. Look at those circled balls. What do you think? Me? I have no idea. I'm more open than most to questioning of evolution because of an article I once read by Tom Bethell. I consider evolution likelier than other theories, but unproven. Archaeology was a fairly recent science, when it was honest, and it hasn't been honest since the jews arrived on American shores in large numbers, around the turn of last century. Where man-artifiacts and man-measures are concerned, the wordful jew spins and lies with aplomb, backed always by the media which, after all, he mostly owns and edits, and nearly wholly, off the internet, controls through paycheck and blackmail. So, let's give these balls their due. They may be pregnant with great meaning. Or not. It's really hard to say. These balls could rewrite history. The things these balls would say, if they could talk. These balls have been around for a long, long time. They may have been around in St. Petersburg, when they heart it was a time for a change, for all I know. It's very hard to say. Gun to my temple, proto


used these small balls to play an early form of croquet. That's just a guess, though. Don't hold me to that. I could be wrong.

2) ratio decidendi -

Came across this in a German-leftist/Greek-communist joint intellectual venture toward "mapping" nationalists in Greece. Read the free online pdf report here.

Ratio decidendi is one of those helpful terms which means precisely what it appears to - the decisive reason. The reason/point on which turns the decision in a (law) case. I never came across this term before, but I could guess its meaning from context, as is often the case. Here's the background of the term at :

Stare decisis (STARE-ee de-SIGH-sis) is the law of precedent - 'stand by things decided,' in Latin. Judges must follow the law, i.e., the settled interpretations of laws clearly intended and carefully written by legislatures. That's how you produce and promote stability in a society. When things are settled, people feel confident enough to try to do things. When things are wild and crazy, they pull in. This is why a decision such as Brown vs. Board of Education is dangerous and bogus - it simply reverses settled law, as a pure power play on the part of courts and judges who think they can get away with it because the powers that be (academics and politicians and media figures) will back them up. When a court simply decides to do a 180-degree reversal on a decades-settled question, social stability is endangered. The people of (Alabama) don't want their sons and daughteres schooling with niggers. That is their democratically expressed will. The court, a minority of one, a judge, simply decides to throw out their democratic will and replace it with his autocratic will. He has in effect made himself the King of Alabama, as it were. When he does this, the people are fully within their rights to drag him out of his bed at night and lynch him. That is exactly what Thomas Jefferson and the Founders would advise them to do. Usurpations become decisis with time themselves, after all. We discussed this at great length in my review of Pat Buchanan's book, in which he discusses the Supreme Court's usurpation of the right to be the final arbiter of Constitutionality. The right does not exist - the power is meant to be disputed among whichever parties have the will to do so, but the Court claimed it, the centralizers backed it, and the opposition was never able, so far, to offer it a challenge.

Obiter dicta (OBB-it-er DIK-ta) are throw-in opinions a judge might offer alongside his official decision on the crucial point. Obiter dicta aren't binding as precedent, but can be taken into account by lower courts, as they will shed light on how the judge might act in subsequent cases, thereby affording other courts away to avoid appeals. The obiter dicta expand and explain his thinking about the matter(s) in question. I've seen obiter dicta used many times in non-legal contexts, whereas, as said, I've never before come across ratio decidendi in any context.

To me, and it may be just me, obiter dicta has a connotation of under-the-breath, outside of a court anyway. Like a verbal lagniappe someone might throw in. Like a garnish insult. You're ugly..and you don't smell very good either. You need to get a job...and a haircut, hippie.

Lagniappe is...let's say you and your queer boyfriend are getting married in Mississippi because some state judge went all Hulk Hogan on the stare decisis re the Magnolia State's definition of marriage. You go to buy your fruity squirter a gorgeous sapphire diamond ring, at a price of $4251.38, including tax. The proprietor throws in a $200 tennis bracelet for your hairy-balled sweety. That's the lagniappe. A little extra, a little throw-in, just for coolness' sake. A little thank you from the shopkeep, in this instance. Pronounced lan-yap. Just for fun I looked it up:

Think customer appreciation day - on the spot. A "thanks for your business" gift, whereas a tschotchke, as we've covered, is more of a hoping-you'll-do-business even-smaller gift. Lagniappe has an interesting etymology:

So it's Louisiana by way of France by way of Spain by way of Quechua (Indians), meaning addition. Now you know.

Anyway, obiter dicta or dictum (plural and singular) can be a useful term to throw in. It's the kind of thing you might find in a Wodehouse. As a sort of slighting side opinion, it fits, all nice and obliquelike. Judge or not, if someone, usually in authority, like parents or coach or teacher, makes a decision on something, presents someone else with it, and throws in a couple side opinions -- you will come across plenty of good situations in which to work this term.

3) on a daily basis. on a regular basis. -

This is the same problem we have with 'in need of.' It's stilted. It's wordy. It's an example of the user not thinking. What does daily mean? It means every day. What does 'on a regular basis' cover that regularly does not? Nothing. The only extra these terms might seem to have is the meretricious (italics if we've discussed this term in earlier columns, just as a useful callback) value of pomposity, which is a real value only to the class you don't want to be a member of. The class which shall go unnamed. Don't try to make yourself and your precious li'l doin's bigger than they are. If they are big, the fact will announce itself without your needing to walk around with verbal sandwich boards. Only use stilted phrasing where you're trying to sound stilted, which would be to achieve a comedic effect, by imitating the class that uses these extra syllables in failed attempt to augment their importanceness.

There is a time to use basis, but only where the basis adds something. Not where it reapeats what is captured in the 'daily' or 'regular.' There must be some 'as opposed to,' explicit or implicit. I can't think of a good example at the moment, but I will stick this in my subconscious and when the answer emanates from the life-giving mental soil, I will include it in that week's column. For I write this column weekly.

The remainder of our words this week will be taken from the remarkable 220-page book Against Nature (1884), by J.-K. Huysmans. This book is alluded to in Oscar Wilde's novel Dorian Gray. It is associated with fin-de-siecle decadence. Fin de siecle is French for end of century, with connotations of degeneration. Decadents were the sworn opponents of what is healthy, natural and wholesome, without in any way pretending to be normal themselves as today's up-with-(gay)-people do; rather, they abhorred the hoi polloi, certainly didn't concern themselves with its ridiculous opinions about politics or anything else, and dedicated themselves to the search for rare and strange shades, flowers, artworks, books, loves and feelings. Oscar Wilde wore a green carnation, precisely because it's a color of carnation you don't see in nature. Decadence is a sort of super-refinement of feeling and taste, to the point that desirable sensations are difficult to find or produce, and the decadent exhausts, sickens, deranges or even destroys himself in the search. The artist is the one to whom everything, in time, becomes disgusting, because his analytical tool is refined to the point of omnirejection, or very nearly so. This is why many artists have odd, heavily lined, perpetually-irritated visages.

4) soubrette -

For a short period before the Franco-Prussian War he also studied law, without much enthusiasm, and lived with a young soubrette in a somewhat sordid liaison described in his first novel, Marthe. [from the intro to J.-K. (Jori-Karl) Huysmans' novel Against Nature (A Rebours, in French).

What is a soubrette? A pert prole girl, basically.

So, a sexy lower-class chick, operating with an eye toward leveraging her assets to get herself into a better position. Nice word.

Now, see, if you knew a pleasingly taut-plump farm-girl-helper named Lou, you could tease her by calling her The Loubrette. She would like it. Once you explained it to her. It would probably fetch her, if I know Arkansas.*

*Allusion to...? Do you know? Are you experienced?**

**Allusion to...? Do you know?

5) specific -

Part of the mission of this column is to examine ordinary words used for their secondary meanings. Here's a good example:

He uses the term as a noun, not an adjective. Now, any adjective may be used as a noun, true, but we can infer, if we know English fairly well, that he isn't doing that but is using specific to mean something specific, like a cure. We look up specific:

For the character Christopher Walken played in this famous sketch...

https://screen.yahoo.com/more-cowbell-174128899.html

...the only specific was...more cowbell.

6) crusty dotards -

I've often used dotards; feels good to know Jori-Karl was using it 100 years before it even occurred to me. Pronounce it to yourself with a French accent. Very satisfying. I like to apply the -ard wherever possible. Droolards is a good one. Of course, we're all familiar with patriotard. The sound has to be right. Many who attempt to conjoin this suffix to nouns they hate miss that point. It really is a matter of music. Some can feel the rhythm and the music of words, and some are tone deaf. For new constructions to have any chance of working, they must be aural - always. Mere visual constructions don't work. Very rarely. First the sound, then the sense. Both are necessary. There are only 26 letters in English. There's an infinite way of saying pretty much anything you want to communicate. There's an art to it. Most likely there's some science underlying the art, as certain sounds are known to funnier than others. But I will leave those discussions for my other column, On Writing.

A dotard is one in his dotage - his older-diaper years. His years of decline and decrepidity. His breakdown years. His rocking-chair years. His Grandpa-Simpson, drool-on-my-chest years. Male-anile (remember our discussion of anile?), or senile, which is, of course, far more common. Senescent works. There are many ways to insult oldsters; make use of them freely, when needed. Older is not wiser. Neither reading nor experience make one sharper - save one reflect. Not that reflection alone is any guarantee valid conclusions are reached. Most people are not that good at pattern recognition, so they continue to make the same old mistakes they always did. Dumb people don't suddenly become intelligent because they're older. They're just old dumb people. That they're too decrepit to recommit their mistakes isn't growth, it's physical breakdown.

7) tautology -

Go ahead and look up all the words in this glorious selection foreign to you; we'll focus on tautology, which is something circular. Here's a famous one: The Bible is the divine word of God! How do you know? It says so in the Bible! Defining a thing in terms of itself is circular - and circularity, circular reasoning, is the heart of the tautology. You're essentially repeating the same assertion in different terms, which lends the appearance of saying something new or effective, but is in fact saying exactly the same thing. It's a verbal d'oh that goes unrecognized, since most people are kind of dopey and a change in covers to them is indistinguishable from a change in contents.

Here's another should-be-but-isn't famous tautology: survival of the fittest. How do you know it's the fittest? It survived! There's something missing called an independent variable. Fitness and survival are defined as the same thing, which renders the intellectual value of the proposition nugatory, which is an uncommoner word for nothingful which is a neologism of recent, like rightnowical, coinage meaning empty of value or worth - fruitless. For Darwin's theory to mean something, there must be a measure of fitness. Otherwise survival of the fittest means nothing other than survival of the survivors. Do you see? If you said, fitness means, in a wolf, having legs longer than .34 meters and a heart-lung capacity of 2.3 liters, then you would have something to measure. If you measured out leg length and lung capacity in 1000 wolves, and then measured the same again in five years, you would have some data to work with. In other words, to have an actual theory, you need something falsifiable - something that can be made or shown to be false by contradictory evidence, should it appear. If there's no way to prove something wrong, then it's not a theory, it's a circular statement. If, for example, I assert the theory that humans require air to live, all you have to do to falsify my theory is produce a human who can live without breathing. If you can, then you have successfully falsified my theory, and I must construct another. What is fitness? It seems like a simple concept, yet it's very far from such a thing.

And here, let me pause to say a word in favor of thinking. How my ears burned when I first read Tom Bethell's description of Darwin's theory as a tautology. How embarrassed I was I had sat there in science class and not figured this out myself. Once you see it, it's obvious.

Now...draw the greater lesson from this: even the things most promoted among us, like evolution or 'holocaust,' can be full of giant holes. Thinking pays dividends. So few people actually think that there are giant reputations and fortunes to be won by doing so as little as once a week, as a famous Vaudevillian once said. For it turns out, contrary to all christian teaching, your head really is intended for something other than a hat fob.

8) marital discords -

A marriage isn't just something between two queers, my children, it can be a joining of any two partners - two colors, as in the above example. I recall mentioning to my old boss Tyrrell how his use of 'hatch' reminded me of chickens, but he remarked that eagles hatch too. Speaking of hatch, I remember another verb of similar build I learned from his writing: scotch. One scotches the plans of one's enemy.

Scotch a plan is the most commonly seen use, but you can think of many other ways to use this simple, useful yet uncommon verb.

Here's an artistic use:

9) lugubrious -

Just a good use of lugubrious, one of my favorite words. If you don't know what it means, look it up; I'm pretty sure I've already told you it means ridiculously sorrowful or mournful. The long u sounds echo the sense of it, which always calls to my mind the voice of Eeyore in Winnie The Pooh.

10) sectary -

Few things are more useful in attacking an opponent than comparing him to an animal. Well, yes, but what I was going for here was depicting him as perfervid fanatic in service of a deranged cult. A deep familiarity with the terms of religion is extremely useful in this life on earth, which, again, is the only life we know of, and, it may be taken for granted, the only life that exists.

One term that could have been used above is hagridden, one of my favorite terms of descriptive opprobrium for folks who have jebus on the brain. Jebus-addled brains are legion, after all, at least in AmeriKwa in 2014. Hagridden basically means you have ghosts and witches running around in your mind, and you've lost sight of the real world for them. Those who focus on non-existent afterlives and imaginary other-worlds tend to end up this way - particularly if they have any kind of bent toward paranoia to start with. Nothing is so congenial to a paranoiac as the kind of lapidary nonsense you find in Revelation.

A sectary is a sect-er. One of a sect. A member of a sect. The term fools us because it's so similar to secretary that we will forget its very existence. But it's a good term.

The general rule is cult < sect < religion. The joke is: a religion is a cult with a football team.

Sectary is useful for political religions, particularly those derived from Marx's ideas. Communists are famously sectarian, or were in the days when they flourished under that name. Any political ideologue, with ideologue defined as one who prefers his ideas to reality - one who allows his ideas to trump reality's counter-evidence -- is fairly and accurately described using conventional terminology for religious groups. More generally, as I said up top, sectary or sectarian or any term conventionally used for religious believers is well suited to being used to describe your political enemy if your intention is to mock his ideas. Especially if you're mocking them because they are wrong in the way religious ideas are wrong - by being overtly counterfactual or dystopian or in some other way closed to the world of actuality and mere facts.

11) torrefaction -

It has been proven repeatedly in tests that what he claims about the wine-merchant's taste-ability is false, but we'll leave that aside. What is torrefaction? If we didn't know, we might guess it had something to do with torrid - possibly to do with heat. That would make sense by the context. Let's look it up.

Still not entirely clear to me how Huysmans was using this, but I guess he means the level of dryness of the tea leaves, in the above quotation. If not, then I suppose he means the intensity of sunlight to which the leaf on the tree or bush was subjected.

12) satiety -

Now, we're used to sated or satiated. We know how to pronounce those. But how do we pronounce satiety? If we don't know, we won't remember. This I emphasize: words are significant first as sounds. Not even as meanings. As sounds. Then meanings. Then verbal designs. We can't remember words whose pronunciations we haven't assimilated. How do we pronounce satiety? We badly want to say SAY-shehh-tee, but...that sounds dumb and wrong. It is. Sated and satiated lead us down the wrong path. The way to remember this word is that it rhymes with sobriety. If you don't believe me, go here and hear it.

This is a word for writing, not speaking. If you used it while you were speaking, your interlocutor wouldn't understand you, most likely. Even if he knew the word, he would tend to think he had misheard you. Aristotle advised to speak as other men do. This is definitely a term for page rather than mouth. It's somewhat like sectary - another term that is ok on the page, but if spoken will be mistaken for secretary by 99% of the audience. Words that are uncommon yet look like common words, as a viceroy to a monarch - it's best one not speak them, but use them in writing if they fit - i.e., if you're not writing for idiots or certain types of paying customers.


viceroy


monarch

13) perspicacious -

You should know that, and I will be privately embarrassed for both of us if you don't, perspicacious pertains to that which through-sees (per = through, spic = see). If you can see through things, you are shrewd, perceptive. Perspicacious is not particularly more useful than a plainer shorter word, but the time will come when you need its extra syllables for your rhythm, and then you'll know to eschew the shrewd for perspicacious. It's also good for alliteration, since p is one of the better rhyming letters, and one of the funnier.

An artistic use:

Insertion for one particular reason: It's ok to say fuck or shit, where they are called for; it is not and never ok to refer to refer to a book as a read, a girl as a lay or a video as a watch. Am ickstem! (English word set in German superlative form, for those who must know, because this column is about learning.) Please make like an agitated Buddhist monk and engage in some pyrotic activity if you even think in this manner, because there is something wrong with you, and its probably congenital. Just throwing that little dictum into your orbiter.

I remember very little of high school, as college made 1000 times greater impression, but I do recall an English final. We had a skinny teacher. I still remember my Beavislike horror when he mentioned "the delectable Janet Lee," this Ichabodiless scrawn of an I-lectern hider-behind. More I liked when he would say, of a girl working a comb, "There goes Rachel, trying to do what God Himself couldn't." (Make herself better looking.) He never tired of that one, and now that I'm of age, I understand where he's coming from. Something never get unfunny. I remember another teacher I had. He was a Texan. The rumor was he had literally shot himself in the foot at one point. He was trying to teach us geography. I still recall his accent when he said "I'm ohna have-ta raht that one dayown," when one kid asseverated that ocean currents were essentially fish trails. I still recall from memory (where else would I recall from, my stomach?) from that English class how some of the kids used to recite some lines from Huckleberry Finn:

Long way round the barn to say, the final in this sophomore class had a short story for us to read. And to interpret the meaning of. I forget who wrote it, possibly Bierce. It was about a man come back to a cabin, and something is amiss. I guessed the meaning was "things are usually worse than they appear." The right answer was, things very often not what they appear. That's what we larval bourgeois were supposed to garner from our lessons, among other things. True enough. Serves one well in encountering 'the' 'holocaust,' 'global warming' and other bit of tripe promoted and popular. The mass is almost defined by its inability to see through things, or, alternatively put, its proclivity for taking things at face value. Reinforced by instruction in the perniciously race-destructive and devolutionary Golden Rule. Which should be abandoned for, as I've said many times, the infinitely wiser and more practical jew (Al) Davis rule: treat others in the way their behavior indicates you'd be wise to treat them. As the late ungreat she-nig poetess Angelou said, the first time someone shows you who he is - believe him. There is wisdom in that, even if a defunct blackamoor said it. (It may be stolen wisdom, for all I know. Most of Angelou's stuff sounds like warmed over, nig-veneered white self-help pabulum, at least to my glorious ear, filched from the back pages of M. Scott Peckerman or that chiclet-toothed giant.)

Quote:

She became a poet and writer after a series of occupations as a young adult, including fry cook, prostitute, nightclub dancer and performer

Almost every famous black was either a prostitute (like Malcolm X and Maya Angelou) or a john (MLK). By similar token, almost every 'great' black goes by a fake name, just as most ghetto rats go by street names.

Notice most of the people lauding Maya Angelou pronounce her name wrong. It's ANGE-eh-lo. Not lou. Lo. They get this wrong on the Grantland podcast, for one example. They are "celebrating" her, as they say -- without knowing how to pronounce her name. What I do like is that in this same podcast they host their inaugural Book Club, and the book they discuss is Walker Percy's novel The_Moviegoer. Percy, if you're not familiar, is considered a Southern gothic writer, I believe; he's beloved as a deep ferlosipher by faileocon ilk, Southern division. I've read this novel and his collected essays; he's ok. Surprising choice by these young hip jew-lefties, but as they talk about movies and media quite a bit, there's the reason. It was on their never-got-around-to, always-wanted-to list. I have read the novel twice and didn't really get much out of it. It's certainly not bad, though, just sort of limp in the way that appeals to the wilted-lettuce people that are the nostalgiatives. Intellectual Catholicism is 99% a pose of taste to thinketasters, and by 99% I mean 100 percent.

Do some body squats, nigger!

14) lymphs -

We know what a nymph is, but what is a lymph? We've heard of lymph nodes! Those are the things under our arms and in our legs where white blood cells congregate to produce great victories over intrusive agents. Something like that. I'm not a scientician.

We must suppose he was using lymph in the now-archaic sense. He's talking about religious writers, so the purity and clarity would fit there. The term comes from Greek mythology. The lymphs were the springs, and the nymphs were the goddesses hanging around but certainly not hover-pissing in them, I'm fairly sure.

So lymph is clear fluid, literally or mythologically, or pure source metaphorically. I guess that's cleared up, but I for one would not use the term except for medical matters.

15) peroration -

Peroration is a fancy term for close; i.e., the conclusion of a speech. You can use it show off your knowledge, if you're bourgeois-inclined. Or, if you're simon pure, i.e., driven by noble motive, i.e. the desire to mock, then you will readily see how it might be employed as faux-high descriptor of some unworthy delivering his oration, Stupid Thoughts on Silly Things from a Over-Degreed Simpleton. If you use this comparatively unfamiliar term, you can't but be thought one of two things: as pretentious, by the average man; as intending mockery, by the man who knows the meaning of perorate/peroration. We live in an age in which even journalists think those free with quotations are pretentious so, well, I just plain wouldn't worry about it. Someone has to keep the torch of anti-stoopidity lit, might as well be you. It's other people's problem they're dumb, not your problem you're smart. As Damone said, when you got that, you got the attitude.


No need to rub their face in it, but then again, let them know, as unsubtly as you need to, that when they're looking at you, they're looking up. The writer is the rapist, and the reader the rape fantasist. Or you can write and think and read like everyone else does, in that 'milk and water' way Huysman describes above. The point of being a human, unlike a cow, is you have the mental means of cumulation to use to vary your forward experience; it doesn't have to be the same damn thing day after day. It just somehow usually is.

Ordinary use:

16) sudorific -

I agree with his theory, and I stated my view long before he his.* (*This cannot be true, yet is.) Perfection is a style failure; imperfection alone allows the highest highs because imperfection heightens highs while perfection levels them. Perfection is overworked, which makes it imperfect but in the wrong way; it is the stylic form of fear-of-apperances manifest in schoolsmarmy types like Messrs PedoStrom and Brown Johnson, which is in no way to deride their honest and giant virtues.

Now, sudorific, for me, fits the category of: words I have seen before, know I have seen before, and cannot recall. From context, I'm guessing it means sleep- or pain-inducing. I have the idea it's a synonym for soporific (sleep-inducing). Looking it up.

Nope! I was totally wrong. It means sweat-producing. What a useful word! All those synonyms are good: sudorific, sudoriparous, diaphoretic. I feel I should know this from sudorificoso or somesimilar in Spanish class, similar to jejunio, for dry/parched, which I learned before ever having heard of jejune.

Use:

Could be a fear-sweat. Could be a sex-sweat, as per Judge Reinhold jerking off on the toilet watching his sister's friend hopping around in the pool. Could be a sweat sweat, the natural product of heat or exertion. Good terms. All useful.

Remember, adults: never obviously exalt your language to impress people That You Know These Words, to floodlight the Taj Majhal that is You; rather exalt, mock-exalt your language to achieve effects - comedy is your best effect. There's never enough funny stuff in this world. Remember that language was invented to mock people, and use it accordingly.

You know, I've called this mock-heroic effect Nielsenic, but it really is not. Nielsen's character is a dummy, not a faux august hero, for the most part. But what is accurate that I'm picking up on is the deep bass or baritone at least sonorousness of his voice, suggesting high-powerful masculine seriousness...contrasted with the low-comedic content. That is never not funny, to me and to many. That's the effect we're shooting for, many times. The Nielsen effect justifies the choice of these obscurer words over their commoner cousins. We are discussing writing as an art, not as mere communication, for which the simplest accurate term is usually best.

"Got to take the bitter with the butter," you may not have heard. By similar token, got to take the terrific with the sudorific.

17) factitious -

Is pronounced the way you'd think. Definition:

It is clear this term belongs to the same family that whelped artifact. I have to admit, this is a word I never use, and I feel shame for that. It's very useful, as you can see from the definition. If a husband and wife are in a group and the husband tells a dumb joke, the wife's laughter is precisely what this term is driving at: completely fake social husband-helping laughter. Or, one could mention the factitious and absurdly long-lasting applause after a particularly sudorific Stalin harangue.

This word is used infrequently, my guess, because it contains the word fact, which is kind of the opposite of its meaning, thus making it difficult to remember, even though it's a simple word to spell and pronounce. Factitious would be a lot easier to remember if it were faketitious. But it ain't, and there's no use crying about it. So salamander up and commit it to the jail cell wing V (for VNN and Vocabulary) in your memory.

Well now, that's quite enough for today. But to recharge our batteries, let's have some delicious food. A pig, processed by echt Deutscher, yields:

18) Schlachtplatte -


...the Schlachtplatte (slaughter dish) is a hearty plate full of freshly slaughtered meat. Traditionally the dish was only eaten on the day of the killing before fridges were invented, and it uses nearly every part of the pig. Consisting of blood sausage, liver sausage, and boiled pork belly and innards, the dish is for committed meat eaters only. For a shot of vitamin C and a dose of fiber, the dish is served with sauerkraut and boiled potatoes.

Literally slaughter plate, or slaughter dish. Schlacht is German for slaughter - of livestock, or for battle, as between human armies. Did you know there is also a German food called Dead Grandma (Tote Oma?) Well, there is...but that is story for another day.

Time grows late... I've twisted enough balloon animals for you caterwauling urchins, today. The sun begins to creep under, and the rabbit that butt-raped my garden last night is licking his his tomato choppers in preparation for round three of bunny bonsai. Someone must see it is not so, and that someone is me. I'm going full Fudd, and I'm going hard. Yes, hasenpfeffer is on the horizon, I can smell it. The Great Chain of Being is 1) rabbits, 2) fruit flies, 3) me, 4) houseflies. But I intend to move up in the rankings, so I must be a-wenting, as the old Indian said. Never fear, I'll be back next week with some warm bread and some cold water. Until then, remember to treat English with proper respect - rough it up a little as you ride it. Only in this way will you elicit all the frissons it has to offer, and that is very much in keeping with the spirit of our jaded old triedall Des Esseintes.//

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