And more fun wit teh words'n'stuff...

I really need to stop stealing from the essays & effluvia guy, but he posts such great stuff.

The ability to make and understand puns is considered to be the highest level of language development. Here are the 10 first place winners in the International Pun Contest: 

1.  A vulture boards an airplane, carrying two dead raccoons.  The stewardess looks at him and says, "I'm sorry, sir, only one carrion allowed per passenger."

2.  Two fish swim into a concrete wall. One turns to the other and says, "Dam!"

3.  Two Eskimos sitting in a kayak were chilly, so they lit a fire in the craft.  Unsurprisingly it sank, proving once again that you can't have your kayak and heat it too.

4.  Two hydrogen atoms meet.  One says, "I've lost my electron." The other says, "Are you sure?" The first replies "Yes, I'm positive."

5.  Did you hear about the Buddhist who refused Novocain during a root canal?  His goal: transcend dental medication.

6.  A group of chess enthusiasts checked into a hotel and were standing in the lobby discussing their recent tournament victories.  After about an hour, the manager came out of the office and asked them to disperse.  "But why?", they asked, as they moved off.  "Because," he said, "I can't stand chess-nuts boasting in an open foyer."

7.  A woman has twins and gives them up for adoption.  One of them goes to a family in   Egypt  and is named "Ahmal." The  other goes to a family in   Spain ; they name him "Juan."  Years later, Juan sends a picture of himself to his birth mother.  Upon receiving the picture, she tells her husband that she wishes she also had a picture of Ahmal.  Her husband responds, "They're twins!  If you've seen Juan, you've seen Ahmal."

8.  A group of friars were behind on their belfry payments, so they opened up a small florist shop to raise funds.  Since everyone liked to buy flowers from the men of God, a rival florist across town thought the competition was unfair.   He asked the good fathers to close down, but they would not.  He went back and begged the friars to close.  They ignored him. So, the rival florist hired Hugh MacTaggart, the roughest and most vicious thug in town to "persuade" them to close.  Hugh beat up the friars and trashed their store, saying he'd be back if they didn't close up shop. Terrified, they did so, thereby proving that only Hugh can prevent florist friars.

9.  Mahatma Gandhi, as you know, walked barefoot most of the time, which produced an impressive set of calluses on his feet. He also ate very little, which made him rather frail and, with his odd diet, he suffered from bad breath.  This made him (Oh, man, this is so bad, it's good) a super calloused fragile mystic hexed by halitosis.

10. And finally, there was the person who sent ten different puns to friends, with the hope that at least one of the puns would make them laugh.

No pun in ten did

Much fun wit teh words'n'stuff

The guy at essays and effluvia posts this every year and I greatly look forward to it.  This year, I decided to crib it from him and share...

The Washington Post has published the winning submissions to its yearly neologism contest, in which readers are asked to supply alternative meanings for common words.

(I believe this is older)

 
The winners are:  
1. Coffee (n.), the person upon whom one coughs.
2. Flabbergasted (adj.), appalled over how much weight you have gained.
3. Abdicate (v.), to give up all hope of ever having a flat stomach..
4. Esplanade (v.), to attempt an explanation while drunk.
5. Willy-nilly (adj.), impotent.
6. Negligent (adj.), describes a condition in which you absentmindedly answer the door in your nightgown.
7. Lymph (v.), to walk with a lisp.
8. Gargoyle (n), olive-flavored mouthwash.
9. Flatulence (n.) emergency vehicle that picks you up after you
   are run over by a steamroller.

10. Balderdash (n.), a rapidly receding hairline..

11. Testicle (n.), a humorous question on an exam.
12. Rectitude (n.), the formal, dignified bearing adopted by proctologists.
13. Pokemon (n), a Rastafarian proctologist.
14. Oyster (n.), a person who sprinkles his conversation with
   Yiddishisms.
15. Frisbeetarianism (n.), (back by popular demand): The belief
   that, when you die, your soul flies up onto the roof and gets stuck
   there.

16. Circumvent (n.), an opening in the front of boxer shorts worn
   by Jewish men.             

The Washington Post's Style Invitational also asked readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply a new definition. 

Here are this year's winners:
           1. Bozone (n.): The substance surrounding stupid people that stops
   bright ideas from penetrating. The bozone layer, unfortunately, shows
   little sign of breaking down in the near future.
           2. Foreploy (v): Any misrepresentation about yourself for the
   purpose of getting laid.
           3. Cashtration (n.): The act of buying a house, which renders the
         subject financially impotent for an indefinite period.
           4. Giraffiti (n): Vandalism spray-painted very, very high.
           5. Sarchasm (n): The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and
   the person who doesn't get it.
           6. Inoculatte (v): To take coffee intravenously when you are
   running late.
           7. Hipatitis (n): Terminal coolness.
           8. Osteopornosis (n): A degenerate disease. (This one got extra
   credit.)
           9. Karmageddon (n): its like, when everybody is sending off all
   these really bad vibes, right? And then, like, the Earth explodes and
   it's like, a serious bummer.           

         10. Decafalon (n.): The grueling event of getting through the day
   consuming only things that are good for you.
         11. Glibido (v): All talk and no action.
         12. Dopeler effect (n): The tendency of stupid ideas to seem
   smarter when they come at you rapidly.
         13 Arachnoleptic fit (n.): The frantic dance performed just after
   you've accidentally walked through a spider web.
         14. Beelzebug (n.): Satan in the form of a mosquito that gets into
   your bedroom at three in the morning and cannot be cast out.
         15. Caterpallor (n.): The color you turn after finding half a grub in
   the fruit you're eating.
And the pick of the literature:
         16. Ignoranus (n): A person who's both stupid and an asshole.

Sometimes there's too much silence

The other day I posted a link on my Facebook page to a particularly appropriate entry at a Twitter feed that I follow called "shitmydadsays":

"I just want silence. Jesus, it doesn't mean I don't like you. It just means right now, I like silence more."

Most days, that's very much how I feel.  I'll babble a blue streak when the occasional mood strikes, but most of the time can't deal with the constant sharing of personal drama and empty, void-filling talk that so many people seem prone to.  It's amazing, though, to think that such verbal diarrhea could be considered a luxury, to realize that there are still places in this world where one has to be careful of their speech and where communication is a controlled, limited thing.

I have a friend blogger who lives in Iran.  Remember Iran?  It was much in the news just a few short months ago, when incumbent leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was re-elected through a seemingly fraudulent process.  Protests erupted immediately throughout the country, and the government responded just as quickly to shut down both foreign news media and internet access.  What's surprising is not so much that speaking out against the elections led to many Iranian citizens being arrested, or worse.  That's still almost an everyday occurrence for peoples such as the Tibetans and Uygurs. The amazing aspect to this particular government crackdown is that much of the news that did make it out into the international press came via Twitter. 

Hard for us in more democratic countries to imagine, huh?  My friend, who goes by the intarwebs pseudonym of human being, is a teacher and a poet with a beautiful voice who speaks words that make one think, words that should be shared.  These days, though, those of us who follow her never know when she'll be able to gain access to the 'net to communicate with us.  Most of us spend hours a day on the intarwebs, both at home and at work.  Those with less easy access can still go to places, libraries, etc, and get on a computer that allows us entry to the World Wide Web.  Stop and think for a moment about those words, separately and then together:  World. Wide. Web.  It's sobering and disturbing to think that some of us, grown adults with something worthwhile to say, are not allowed such access out of the fear that we might gain a measure of freedom.
    

hb, if you have the opportunity to see this, I hope you don't mind me sharing your latest words.

sometimes i've got so much to say that
oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooi keep silent

sometimes i shout so loudly that
ooooooooooooooooooooooooooono one hears me

sometimes tomorrow is so far away that
ooooooooooooooooooooooooooosoon is yesterday

sometimes you are so close that
ooooooooooooooooooooooooi can't think of you...

Originally posted at Thus Spake the Crow, Sunday, December 6th, 2009.