#uranium pile

I rather enjoy dictionary.com. I imagine that this sentiment is often repeated, and I’m currently processing a surprising level of ambivalence not about the my own interest in Word of the Day. The jokes people make about my cyclopedic personal lexicon barely scratch the surface of what is a complex process of word acquisition which involves almost no rote memorization whatsoever. Hence, I’m not doubtful of my own “verbal” process or its singularly superlative nature. What vexes me is that I have no doubt that almost every word twerp who avails himself of an interest in Word-a-Day imagines it an unnecessary diversion and then becomes surprised at the failure rate of his lexical compendium then says to himself, “I don’t know why I like Word of the Day, I am a Human Dictionary.” 

I could give a shit about the perfectitude of my word-list. Among the following list, Raze is obvious. I'd be a master of that meaning in the apocalyptic event that I could lay my hands on a few hundred kilograms of suitably pure fissile transuranic isotopes. G*d's a better planner than that, fortunately. While I've got a dashing head of hair which is so manageable I've never used a comb even while it was once three feet longer by the strand, I know I do not have a good foundation in Hellenic lexical roots, so Crinose would have been known to the Sam who did not find Homer to be drivellous. Flibbertigibbet derives from an early Victorian ethos which also generated the word “Quiz” and such literary towers as the serial Shirley Conan Doyle and Oliver Havisham-Cratchett. Reading, of course, bores me, so I rarely pick up a word from the literature so well-trapped in its own era as to sport genre tags named from the British sovereign ruling as the ink dried on paper.

What bugs me is that I firmly associate (though superficially) with a group of people who might be possessed of the veritably antipathic notion that English is a superlative (or even remotely expressive) string of bar-syllabic cognitive thumbnails by virtue of its vastly more numerous lexicon. While the next largish language in Europe has a total word count of around one quarter of a million distinct definitions for a similarly large number of separate words, English was declared subject to an exhausted count when the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary proffered their intent to stop counting the lexicon while assessing its number at around six-hundred ninety thousand words. Despite three distinct and utterly separate linguistic epochs, tripling the weight of the the next, average guy on the block means you’re very sick and virtually non-dexterous.

Speaking French, I can add two to four letters to engage a verbal mode which generates concepts which I’ve found to be almost entirely outside the cognitive and philosophical grasp of native English speakers.

Nooo, this particular ambivalence derives from the fact that I have squarely placed myself among a group of people whose dentition I’d certainly be inclined to dramatically and immediately alter if Fate were to permit the heinous situation of thiers and my own contemporary physical proximity.

I know damned well I'm not a word twerp. Thus I relish browbeating people with what has been politely dubbed as my own tendency to be "long winded." It's a private joke which enables me to infuse much more interesting sub-textual thematics into whatever esoteric bullshit I happen to bloviate.

For example: I’ll let child psychologists and psycholinguistics experts handle theories of language acquisition. I have no doubt that, as I intrude upon a conversation with relevant, cogent and narrowly specific information and ideation in a situation of making the first acquaintance of either of these types of professionals (or any other keeper of special wisdom) while they are engaging any esoteric and narrowly understood concept which they will have been pondering but not discussing incidentally and simultaneously as I first entered their presence, my own methodology for learning words might create a data point which falls outside the plot demanded by the hypotheses of either psycholinguists or psychologists. Ordinarily, the means I use to figure out what stuff means requires a tutor who has no idea he's instructing me or that I've heard a word he's ever said.

Oddly, it is by a similar method that I’m aware of the potentially high dental and suture-related expenses which would bankrupt a party joined of the combined group of myself and a bevy of word twerps.

Now, I'm waylaid by this ambivalence because of a special spice in the mix. See, this all came to the fore as I pondered yet another etymological absurdity which indicates a feature of a particular word for uncontrolled, plosive and repetitive fasiculations of the diaphragm, engaged as through parasympathetic nervous control but exhibiting autonomic nervous “uncontrollablity” (see the following list entry of an English language adoption of the ancient Latin for hiccough).

The vexation which has crippled the dromedary is this:

It seems ubiquitous among Terran languages for the word for hiccup in any language to be of onomatopoetic derivation. This is one of the fun factoids I’ve discovered while on my lifelong traipse into the enjoyment of etymology and ponder how the lightening of awareness can sometimes strike a bunch of shit-flinging monkeys.

At time’s I’m stumped: Read the following, singultus, an ancient Latin word for hiccup, In no language where I've discovered it, I have never found this word to resemble the sound of such plosive diaphragmatic fasiculations among any language in which I’ve discovered it. But, the sound of a hiccup is, in fact, universal in character. You dash a bit of cocktail bitters onto a lime, suck it, and they go away.  The alternative medical treatment of similar effectiveness is treatment with botulinum toxin, musculonervous paralytic so potent that it's LD-50 in humans measures in nanograms. Also, a botox treatment for hiccups can exceed ten kilodollars.

I had been so looking forward to a few enlightening moments considering this gem of a conundrum (why a species whose interpersonal communication is based in sound modulation cannot create a word for a unique sound which emanates from their bodies and which is unambiguously identifiable), I realized I’d like to debuckify a whole bunch of Mensa goons who hold that "Words equal Intellect." So, visions of making IQdiots swallow dentin became a delightful projection which directly competed working on the problem of how fundamentally incapable and cognitively handicapped are a bunch of (OH SHIT) hairy, shit-flinging simians among whom I find myself whiling away nearly forty years of abject and increasing discomfort became a cognitive dissonance which has got me somewhat nonplussed.

I’m also a little ickey grossed out by the realization that I’m so closely proximate beings who still sport fur. Hell, the word hairy has such a psychological hammerblow to my forehead that I actually become ill when I hear it. And then there's:

Crinose, for G*d’s sake is a word which sounds as disgusting as it might be to look down upon one’s chest or arms or (beyondinconceivablyhorrificallyunsanitary) shoulders and see an actual accumulation of HAIR!

I don’t mind patting my spaniel on the tummy to feel her furry belly. Cat’s have a nice texture, but I swear, if the naturally absolutely depiled back of my hand makes contact with a single keratinacious strand on the leg of any touchable female (or thankfully more unlikely as I’m celibate by means of speciation) her underarm, my explosive autonomic reaction of disgust would be involuntary. OHSHITOHSHIT: It’s been a long time since I’ve thought of how gross hairiness happens to be. The last thing I need is to remember that a good number of the shit-flinging monkeys in charge around here are actually fur-bearing. I can tolerate the “standard” patchiness which appears to facilitate reproductive selection by enhancing aesthetic appeal. I have it, and my cranial tuft is among the best on earth. My hair is so awesome that I have been hoping that It might be tastefully preserved not just in legend but among my own reliquary after I go kick down the doors of some celestial bureaucrats and ask who in the hell was responsible for this bullshit assignment.

Se how easy it was to return to the Verity of Being Singular. What’s funny is that I’m a tad chilly because the swamp cooler has decided to work for once.

Nice. June, July and August have passed and taught me that my nervous system will now cease to function when the ambient molecular motion derives from a caloric energy equivalent to greater than 302.6º Absolute (29.4º C and 85ºF). 

Thankfully, the naturally completely depiled dermis I'm wearing, which is adorned only by the pigmented ink I have chosen to be there and have paid to exhibit is experiencing a rare and extremely refreshing state of chill. So, I’m wondering which is abnormal: How does one observe goose flesh if one has a pelt on one’s arms? Aren’t the epidermal structures associated with the goose flesh a phenomenon where muscle fibers which would control the position of one's fur (which apparently waves around like some beyond-disgusting psyllia)? That's IT! WHO assigned me to live among these idiots whose fur you wouldn’t want for a garment because they’re perpetually flinging their own shit at each other.

I Mean, Not Merely Are They FURRY, The FOLLOWING ARE EXAMPLES OF THE SORTS OF bar-syllabic utterance with which they inform each other of the noteworthy vicissitudes of being a group of furry shit-flingers capable of burning mineral oil to the point of their own pharmacologic toxification and piling enough uranium willfully to destroy their own largest geographical units of organization.

SINGULTUS 1. (medical) a hiccup.

FLIBBERTIGIBBET 1. (archaic) a gossip. 2. a chattering or flighty, light-headed person.

RAZE 1. to tear down; demolish; level to the ground: to raze a row of old buildings. 2. to shave or scrape off.

CRINOSE 1. hairy.

ETHOS 1. (Sociology) the fundamental character or spirit of a culture; the underlying sentiment that informs the beliefs, customs, or practices of a group or society; dominant assumptions of a people or period: In the Greek ethos the individual was highly valued. 2. the character or disposition of a community, group, person, etc.

PULCHRITUDINOUS 1. physically beautiful; comely.