Dysphoria.

I actually did not know this word and had to look it up:

Dysphoria -  a state of feeling unwell or unhappy

And then I was all like, “Well how the hell did I not know that word? I basically live there!”

I live on Dysphoria Lane in the town of Dysphoria (where I am in the mayor) in the nation of Dysphoria, which is bordered by the Mountains of Ennui and the Sea of Restlessness.

And then I thought to myself that I would have to justify not knowing this word (fancy writer and English Major that I am) and that made me think of this:

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Twang a Lute

That last poem was about a woman I was introduced to during my recent travels. Her name was not Marie but she actually was an organic horticulturalist and as soon as she said it I said that I was going to steal that for a poem. Those words just feel good in the mouth. Go ahead and say it out loud right now: organic horticulturalist.

It’s fun to say, right?!

This is one of those times when I would have to agree with William Burroughs in that the sound and the feel of the words is the source of our pleasure (as opposed to their meanings). I guess we should take that with a grain of salt though since Burroughs also once wrote the sentence, “Naked Mugwump twangs a lute.”

The editors here at Standardkink have been quietly muttering “the organic horticulturalist” to themselves since I wrote that last poem and they have also been composing a list of other professions which are similarly pleasurable to say out loud:

The desirable phlebotomist

The despondent urologist

The schizophrenic meteorologist

The syphilitic televangelist

The condescending dentist

The quadriplegic archaeologist

The incestious epedimiologist

The lovelorn mixologist

The flammable typist

The buoyant marine biologist

The forgetful hypnotist

The disoriented oncologist

The hearing impaired flutist

The vengeful zoologist

The moist philatelist

The inconsistent arsonist

The incarcerated organist

The debauched hydroclimatologist

The engorged pederast

The hypoglycemic pediadist

The agoraphobic aerialist

The carnivorous mammalogist

The cunning linguist

The cantankerous gastroenterologist

Spoiler alert, “The Moist Philatelist” is totally going to be the name of my band’s next album.

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Svengali.

I have also been watching a lot of “Psych” on Hulu (because, as lives go, I would enjoy living that one) and one guy just said to another guy, “Don’t be a rabid porcupine about it.”

Also there was this: “I am a detective, not a svengali. I think I would know if I were a svengali.”

Also this:

SHAWN: I’m not Rainman.

GUS: You sing like Rainman.

I am going to start talking like that to people. Just try and stop me.

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Sartorial.

One of the things I enjoy about reading magazines I don’t often read is that the writing tends to seem new and interesting. And also, sometimes, annoying.

While I was reading that Vogue on the plane I came across the word “sartorial” which means “of or relating to a tailor or his craft.” I only know that because Barney explained it once on “How I Met Your Mother” and it stuck to the sticky part of my brain.

So I came across this word – all high faluten and fancy pants – on page 22 while charting the “sartorial evolution” of the actress Allison Williams who is on “Girls” and is – turns out – also the daughter of Brian Williams.

I shrugged a little. It is a fashion magazine after all and so the word is in their wheelhouse, so why not rock it? I drop the word “semiotic” whenever the fuck I can because I have a very expensive English degree. So live and let live.

BUT THEN! There was the word again! Right there on page 59 introducing a spread on the best dressed actresses of 2012 and describing “Kristen Stewart’s disregard for sartorial convention” and so now I know that I am being punked, in what is surely the world’s weirdest and most specific punk ever. Firstly, Kristen Steward does not has a disregard for sartorial convention, she just dresses poorly and makes odd choices (for instance, the choice to become an actress even though she lacks the ability to emote with her face.) And secondly, I have no problem with somebody dropping a nice ten dollar word occasionally, but twice and so close together? That’s a bit much and it makes me think that the writes over there all had a slumber party and watched “How I Met Your Mother “ on DVD and all listened to Barney say the word and all of them simultaneously and joyously jotted it down in their pink dream journals. But whatever. No big deal. Nobody cares but me anyway. So I read on.

AND THEN! SIX PAGES LATER! THERE IT WAS AGAIN! On page 65 describing Emma Stone’s “sartorial powers” and keep in mind that this was a photo spread, so the only text on the intervening six pages was in caption form. Well this just did not make me happy at all. I quickly composed a letter of complaint in my head:   

Dear The Sartorial Writing Staff at Vogue Magazine,

Sartorial.

Sartorially,

The Editors at Standardkink

And I would have sent it too, except I was on a plane and also I am too lazy to ever actually send any of my letters of complaint, of which I have drafted very, very many.

I suppose it could be worse. I suppose that the word could just never be used and it could be allowed so slowly wither and die like so many good words (“civility” is a good word that has died this way, both as a word and as a value too). However, something about the way it was used THREE TIMES so quickly in a magazine that should know lots and lots of fashion-related words, just made its use seem somehow cheap. To me at least, and I have obviously spent a lot of time ruminating on this.

Fear not though. I also read a copy of The New Yorker on that flight and, say what you will about the puffed up elitists over there at The New Yorker, they know how to use words. And they use them dizzying well. They can build sentences like Rube Goldberg machine. On page 44 of the December 24 & 31, 2012 issue, while describing damaged art that is not worth repairing, they wrote:

Such works – those for which the cost of conservation and the subsequent loss in market value are greater than the amount for which the works are insured – will enter into a strange netherworld.

That ladies and gentlemen, is a motherfucking sentence.

I’m not saying it is the best one ever, but it certainly is bold and almost taunting. (The best sentence, some say, is from the Bible and it is this: Jesus wept. One of my favorite sentences is from a book called “My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist” by Mark Leyner, but I will tell you about that some other time.)

However, later in that same issue - and kind of sorta lamely - on page 132 in a review of the movie “This is 40” a writer is talking about the bourgeois family in the movie saying, “Here is all the plentitude and warmth and the triviality and sadness of Los Angeles life.” Although, what would one expect from a magazine that considers itself the reliable and worthy maker of taste for New York City. To prove that NYC can’t help itself from LA-basing, the review – which is a review of a sweet and completely harmless comedy mind you – also waxes rhapsodic by bemoaning, “In Los Angeles, time has a particular poignancy, since the body can never be young enough to satisfy an unsustainable ideal.” You know, that is probably even true, but I have spent a lot of time in New York and I have seen some pretty bad plastic surgery there too. Just saying.

Now that I have written this admittedly complainy and pretentious blog post, I will try to redeem my humanity in your eyes by posting the below pictures of Emma Stone (because it is tangentially related and because EVERYONE has a crush on Emma Stone) and a heart meltingly cute kitten.

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Past Participle of Eat.

Have you ever been making a list of thing you recently did and did not eat and suddenly been struck by the desire to know the precise definition of the word “eaten”?

Me too!

Here is the one that comes up on Google and the only reason I am bothering to put it up here is because I really thought that it was dead on. So well-written of a definition that there is really very little I could do but simply shrug and go, “Yep, that’s what that means.”

1.Eaten past participle of eat (Verb)
Verb: 1. Put (food) into the mouth and chew and swallow it: "he was eating a hot dog"; "she watched as he ate".

I like to believe that there is a man out there who is considered to be the greatest living writer of definitions. His coworkers and contemporaries secretly hate him. Women (albeit librarians and Sophomore English teachers) want him, and men (albeit librarians and Sophomore English teachers) want to be him. His reputation proceeds him. His services are unreasonably expensive. He only writes by quill and he always has a monocle in his vest pocket but never puts it on.

Anyway, I bet he is the one who wrote that. That’s just how good it is.

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P.S.
It now dawns on me that the definition above does not actually use the word “eaten”, so perhaps he is not as good at his job as we all believed.
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Feed.

I was recently shown this very blog as it appears if you have it as a feed on a Mac, and I have to say, I was completely horrified! The man who designed the Standard Kink site and masked that look over to Blogger did a very good job and I have always been very pleased with the simple stylish work that he did. That being said, when you see this thing on a feed it looks like … well, just words on a white page! The horror!

It was scary because it means that there’s no ornamentation to the words! They’re just … WORDS!

And it was right then that I realized that I desperately needed to up my game.

Which, incidentally, scared me so much that I haven’t posted anything in awhile.

Sadly, upping one’s game is much easier said than done.

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Google Santorum.

So you’re super cool and hip and with it and all internet and pop-culture savvy, so I’m sure you already knew about this, but I just found out about it.

Here is an article about it:

Santorum can't shake a Savage 'redefinition'

Or you could click THIS LINK (unless you're my Mother. Mom, DO NOT click the link!)



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Words Today.

Today I happened to encounter several words that I am not accustomed to encountering on a run-of-the-mill Wednesday. These aren’t words I didn’t know, but rather words I don’t generally encounter in life.

Polymath – If ever you are asked to introduce me at a Rotary Club luncheon or a WGA awards banquet (be still my heart!) then I would like you to use this word to describe me. Thanks!

Presumed – Not a terribly esoteric word or anything, but somehow – I think – it has some implied lasciviousness. Maybe that’s just me who thinks that though. Problem being this word was said to me in the most un-lascivious of conversations today. It always makes we smile when people use words I think are dirty in a completely not dirty way.

Presumptive – This was used in the same conversation as ‘presumed’. The two words were used interchangeably. Normally I would rush to my dictionaries to figure out what exactly the difference is, however, I did not. For today I will pretend that the difference is that ‘presumed’ is kinda dirty and ‘presumptive’ is not.

(My dictionaries.)


Adjudicate – I’m absolutely CERTAIN that this word was not used properly when said to me today (in reference to verifying if property taxes were calculated correctly), but I’m too polite to correct people, and I don’t like to get my (secret) English degree all splashed all over everybody when they talk to me.

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Fun with Words!

Today one of the guys I work with described something as “an exercise in pedanticism” and I just thought that was kinda cool.

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The Humorfulness of Words.

So this is going to be stupid and pedantic, but I like to think about words and specifically what a mixed up melting pot of a mutt the English language is.

What is the opposite of humorless? Strictly speaking I think that it should be humormore. Or humor-more. Because the less suffix is what changes the word for humor to no humor. And the opposite of less is more. So the opposite of humorless should be humormore.

But I know that “humormore” isn’t a word. Initially I honestly thought that the opposite of humorless would be humorful, but Microsoft Word is giving me the red squiggles on that one. So I hopped on the google machine and discovered that the internet says that it is a word (and is even allowed in Scrabble).

But technically, shouldn’t the opposite of humorful be humorempty. Since humorful is a word constructed to mean “full of humor” the opposite should mean “empty of humor” because humorless is also constructed and would technically mean “having less humor” which is not the same as being empty of humor, because empty means that there is none inside, which is pretty absolute, but less is a comparison. It just means that there is not as much as there is someplace else. And that is not the same as being empty. But we all know that that is not how these words work.

A grain silo which is grain-less is understood to be empty of grain and it doesn’t need to be sitting right next to a grain silo which is full in order for us to know that.
I’m sure that I am probably understanding some of these words wrong, so if anybody knows more about these things, feel free to pipe up. Just don’t get me started on why flammable and inflammable mean the same thing.

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A Ghost Living in Us.

I am reading a book called Atmospheric Disturbances by a very talented writer named Rivka Galchen. Essentially it is the story of a man who believes that his wife has been replaced by an imposter (for all my fellow word fetishists out there, he calls her “a simulacrum”). On a deeper level, it is a story of how me understand and deal with love in our lives.

I just read this passage and liked it a lot:

It’s like a ghost living in us, our blood, that’s what I think it is like, having something within us – like our blood, like our livers, like our loves – that goes about it’s business without consulting us.

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Fascinating New Words & Phrases!

Since I have been becoming interested in this whole outdoors-y, backpacking/camping/hiking thing, I have been doing what any descent English major would do, I have been reading about it obsessively. I figure that this is just exactly like that movie “The Edge” with Anthony Hopkins, skinny Alec Baldwin and the always delightful Elle Macpherson, where Anthony Hopkins has like never been outside before but knows how to survive in the forest after a plane crash because he has read every book in the known universe. Man, Anthony Hopkins is a badass.

Anyway, I have been trying to learn as much as I can about this stuff and in the process of doing that I have come across a lot of new words and phrases that are a lot of fun. Below are a few of my favorites, along with the best definitions I have been able to cobble together. Something that is very interesting about these words and phrases is that since there is no Oxford English Dictionary of Being Outside (though somebody should get to work on that STAT!), the definitions themselves tend to vary a lot depending on who you talk to or what website you read. I have even seen message boards where people get a little nasty while splitting hairs about what exactly constitutes “fastpacking”. Seriously, there are people who are not messing around about this stuff.

I even read an unintentionally hilariously and totally not-ironic blog post some dude wrote about how the difference between Super Ultra Light backpacking and regular backpacking had nothing to do with the weight you carry but rather about your mental strength and determination and how most people don’t “have a strong enough will” to be Super Ultra Light backpackers and so the reason more people don’t do it is because they are “mentally weak.” Man, that guy was a douche bag!

Anywhoo, here are the words and phrases:

Ultra Light: This is basically just regular backpacking, but with at a much lighter overall load on your back. They say the average hiker has about 30 lbs of stuff with them for a two or three day trip. Ultra Light hikers carry significantly less. The general consensus seems to be that an Ultra Light backpacker carries 10 lbs or less.

Super Ultra Light: This is the same as Ultra Light backpacking only the person is carrying 5 lbs or less (again, there are no rules, but 5lbs seems to be the general consensus).

Base Pack Weight: This one is fun. This is how much all of your stuff weighs but NOT including “consumables” which is stuff like food and water and any fuel for your stove or whatever. The reason that they use this measurement is because the weight of your “consumables” will vary depending on the length or your trip, but the weight of your stuff doesn’t change, so this is a good way to figure out how heavy or light you are. However be forewarned! Some people will tell you this is their weight but not tell you they are talking about Base Pack Weight, which means they are trying to trick you! For instance, when somebody like the douche bag mentioned above says, “Yeah, I did the Continental Divide Trail with a 4 pound pack because I have a strong will and vote Republican.” Well he is talking about his Base Pack Weight. If the dude took 60 pounds of Oreo cookies with him, he gets to leave that out when he tells you how Super Ultra Light he is.

The Ray Way: Okay, so there is a guy named Ray Jardine who wrote a book about how to backpack really light (ironically the book is 500 pages long and weighs a pound). A lot of people credit him with creating - or at least raising the profile of – “Ultra Light backpacking” and he has a cultish following, though he seems to be just a pretty cool guy. But a lot of people talk about “Ray” or “The Ray Way” when talking about backpacking and I personally find it a little bit creepy. Like most things though, it is the proselytizing, die-hard adherents who are creepy, not the man or the ideas themselves. This is his website (Just a warning, dude loves him some garish colors! Yeah he does!)

Trailrunning: This is exactly what it sounds like, which is “running on hiking trails”. Instead of taking a nice hike up the side of a hill and saying, “Look at all the beautiful plants and butterflies, hooray!” you RUN up the side of that hill saying, “Screw you hill! I laugh at your thousand foot elevation gain!” I am ashamed to admit it, but I think that trailrunning sounds pretty badass (though not as badass as Sir Anthony Hopkins) and I am trying to get into good enough shape to try it. My fitness regiment currently involves carrying 60 pounds of Oreo cookies around with me at all times.

Fastpacking: Okay, so if you take Ultra Light backpacking and smash that into Trailrunning, you will end up with Fastpacking. Like I said before, people seem to love to fight about this for some reason. There seems to be a The-Jets-vs.-The-Sharks kind of arguments between Ultra Light backpackers and hard-core joggers about exactly who came up with Fastpacking, but after awhile you just scream at your computer, “Who the fuck cares!” Anyway, as near as I can tell this is when you take only the most basic camping stuff with you and you jog trails all day, make camp for the night, wake up and jog all day again and then make camp someplace else. Do this for a few days and – I think – you are Fastpacking! Congratulations?


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Some Words and What I Remember About Them.

Some words I like and where I first encountered them.


Ensorcelled
To enchant or bewitch. I had never heard this word until it was used on The West Wing by Bradley Whitford’s character Josh Lyman. Of course, Aaron Sorkin wrote the wrote into Josh’s mouth and – as is his style – he used it like a diamond and then tossed it off, with nary a moment’s thought. That small, singular moment of glimmering is what language can do best. It only lasts for just the second, but that second can burn with the heat of a nova if the chemistry of words is in the right order. Anyway, I was bewitched by this word. Speaking of which . . .

Ephemeral
Lasting a very short time. This is one of those words that seems to come up every day when you’re an English mjor but which is never encountered out in the wide wilds of the world. While it is only meant to describe something as fleeting, I have always understood it to imply a grandness and a sadness all at once. As if in describing something this way, we are remarking on how saddened we are to see it go.

Cloying
My Ex, Violet, used this word in an email once and I had to rush to a dictionary. She was describing herself and her fear that she was being cloying, but simply by using the word, it made me love her more. That was back in the good old days.

Autodidact
A self-taught person. I first heard this word in Professor Martin Pousson’s class at CSU Northridge (Pousson is a phenomenon of nature in and of himself, both flamboyantly and badassedly gay all at once, he invents his own paradigm). He used this word to describe Jorge Luis Borges and when I heard it I felt like I had finallt been given a proper Christian name. I used to make the lame English Department joke that I was an autodidact but I had to go back to school to learn that word.

One-off
One of a kind or limited to a single time. One of my bosses at work has a habit of saying this when she is talking about something unique and since I had never heard it before this job, I had no fucking idea what the hell she was talking about. Unfortunately there is a part of my brain that thinks it would be rude to be all, “What the hell are you trying to say right now?” Apparently its derivation is wrapped up in English slang. Anyway, I use it all the time now.



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