Miscellany – Of words and oranges and lambs…
Feel like some wordplay for the festive season? Well try these from the Washington Post for a giggle. The newspaper published a contest for readers in which they were asked to supply alternative meanings for various words. These were some of the winning entries:
Negligent, (adj.), describes a condition in which you absent-mindedly answer the door in your nightie
Lymph, (v.) to walk with a lisp.
Balderdash, (n.) a rapidly receding hairline.
Testicle (n) a humorous question on an exam.
Oyster (n.) a person who sprinkles his conversation with Yiddish expressions.
Pokemon (n.) a Jamaican proctologist.
Circumvent (n.) the opening in the front of boxer shorts.
Willy-nilly (adj,) impotent.
Some years back the paper also asked readers to take a word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting or changing one letter and then supplying a new definition: The winners included:
Intaxication: Euphoria at getting a tax refund, which lasts until you realise it was your money to start with.
Giraffitti: Vandalism spray-painted very, very high.
Sarchasm: the gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn’t get it
Glibido: All talk and no action.
Osteopornosis: A degenerate disease, (this one got extra credit).
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Racial tensions surface in odd places and times in the Polynasia of Auckland. When open-door migration came to the city, the newcomers described local kiwi Chinese as bananas – yellow on the outside, white inside. They made shows of their wealth, they bought and demolished elegant old homes and at supermarkets and shops, didn’t seem to know how to queue.
You can often see and hear Pakeha stewing over these cultural gaffes, but with a Kiwi phlegm they have also adapted to the newcomers as they became… well, bananas too. But the other day a retired gruff tradie, described how he reacted when he saw what must have been a new Asian migrant picking through oranges at the local supermarket’s fruit and vege shelves.
“This guy was pushing his thumb into the oranges and then putting them back. Did it to about three of them and I said: ‘you going to buy them?’ “Nah, Nah” he said.
“So I picked up one of the oranges, squeezed the juice out over his head – and he squealed p’lice, p’lice! The tradie looked over to a staffer and asked ‘You gonna call the cops?’ He grinned, shook his head – and went back to his work.”
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Remember that children’s story about the Emperor having no clothes? Here’s another more local take from an eight-year-old who recently visited Auckland’s Ambury Park farm to see among other things, the endearing little lambs. She was so moved she wrote this:
Lambs are Mammals
Lambs are Herbivores
Some lambs are Black
Lambs can be
cut up and roasted.
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