Wordplay - a little Sunday morning humor

[dalaigh lllama]

I got this in an email and thought I'd share. There are several worthy of being incorporated into the DU lexicon, IMO. Might I suggest using the words in bold while watching Sunday morning talk shows? Enjoy!

Here's the Washington Post's Mensa Invitational which once again asked readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply a new definition.
The winners are:


1. Cashtration (n.): The act of buying a house, which renders the subject financially impotent for an indefinite period of time.


2. Ignoranus: A person who's both stupid and an asshole.


3. Intaxication: Euphoria at getting a tax refund, which lasts until you realize it was your money to start with.

4. Reintarnation: Coming back to life as a hillbilly.


5. Bozone (n.): The substance surrounding stupid people which stops bright ideas from penetrating. The bozone layer, unfortunately, shows little sign of breaking down in the near future.


6. Foreploy: Any misrepresentation about yourself for the purpose of getting laid.


7. Giraffiti: Vandalism spray-painted very, very high.


8. Sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.


9. Inoculatte: To take coffee intravenously when you are running late.


10. Osteopornosis: A degeneratedisease. (This one got extra credit.)


11. Karmageddon: It's 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.


12. Decafalon (n.): The gruelling event of getting through the day consuming only things that are good for you.


13. Glibido: All talk and no action.


14. Dopeler Effect: The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.


15. Arachnoleptic Fit (n.): The frantic dance performed just after you've accidentally walked through a spider web.


16. Beelzebug (n.): Satan in the form of a mosquito, that gets into your bedroom at three in the morning and cannot be cast out.


17. Caterpallor (n.): The color you turn after finding half a worm in the fruit you're eating.

The Washington Post has also published the winning submissions to its yearly contest, in which readers are asked to supply alternate meanings for common words. And the winners are:


1. Coffee, n. The person upon whom one coughs.


2. Flabbergasted, adj. Appalled by discovering how much weight one has 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. Absent mindedly answering the door when wearing only a nightgown .


7. Lymph, v. To walk with a lisp.


8. Gargoyle, n. Olive-flavored mouthwash.


9. Flatulence, n. Emergency vehicle that picks up someone who has been 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. The belief that, after death, the 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.

[Ian David]

1. Some of those are very old, like sarchasm and bozone.

IIRC, Bozone originally appeared in Omni Magazine.

Or perhaps Sniglets.

[dalaigh lllama]

3. Are you saying you've already seen these a brazillion times?

No, I won't go there. :D

[Sanity Claws]

2. These are great!

If you have the Washington Post link, please post it. I'd love to bookmark it and send it to others.

Edited for clarification

[dalaigh lllama]

4. Sorry. I got it in an email with no link

And from what the first poster said, I guess some of these have been around for a while. I'd never seen them, tho.

[Sanity Claws]

5. I just noticed that you are a lllama with three l's

Good thing Ogden Nash is no longer around. You would confuse him totally.

[dalaigh lllama]

6. He would definitely lose his silk pajama

hehe

[Sanity Claws]

8. Are you related to Dolly Llama?

I love saying Hello to her. :)

[dalaigh lllama]

10. Ha! Yes, I must be

"dalaigh" is pronounced "Dolly."

Funny how two DUers named "dalaigh lllama" and "Sanity Claws" would enjoy a thread on wordplay, eh?

[ensho]

7. haven't laughed that much in ages. wonderful words!

thanks for posting

[dalaigh lllama]

11. You're quite welcome

They are fun, aren't they? :hi:

[malaise]

9. Very nice

Bookmarked

[scarletwoman]

12. Just goes to show, nothing ever dies on the internets, it all just cycles endlessly...

Not that these aren't funny, but I swear I got the same list in an email almost 10 years ago.

IIRC, the Washington Post runs this word play contest every year (or used to, anyway). I'm pretty sure those are the winners from 1999 or 2000 -- years ago for sure.

Now I'm off to do a search to see if this contest is still going on...

sw

[dalaigh lllama]

15. Recycling is in

I must have missed these on their first internet go-round. Or, worse yet, I've just forgotten I saw them. oh, oh...

[scarletwoman]

19. This has been circulating for over TWELVE YEARS! See my post #18 below.

Obviously, judging from most of the posts in this thread, there are still plenty of people who've never seen this list before -- so you've done a lovely thing, bringing fresh laughs to The People.

:D
sw

[Sparkly]

13. Hilarious!

:rofl:

(I think my favorites were reintarnation, rectitude, and oyster.)

[Stinky The Clown]

14. Fecefication .... I made up the word this morning. I should have posted it here instead of .....

.... in its own thread: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x5059228

Fecefication: turning to shit a country so as to steal its wealth.

[dalaigh lllama]

16. Well worth a doctoral feces on that subject, I'd say

:D

[rosesaylavee]

17. Aaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhh......

:rofl:

Thanks for posting - needed that laugh!

[scarletwoman]

18. Back from my search -- I bring knowledge! Tah dah!

There is a weekly column in the Washington Post called "The Style Invitational" that runs different wordplay contests every week. Here's this week's column: Week 804: Our Type o' Joke

Here's a column from 2007 that references the "Mensa Invitational": Week 699: Our Greatest Hit

Excerpt:

It still hasn't stopped: With mystifying regularity, we continue to receive (often passed through several mailboxes at The Post) unsolicited entries to what's sometimes called the "Mensa Invitational," and most recently "Change a Letter, Change a Lot": The results of Week 271 (my bold) have continued to orbit in cyberspace for almost 10 years, picking up forwarders' own efforts along the way. We hope these lost souls find us this week.

Doing the math; since this week is their Week #804, Week #271 occured in mid-December, 1997.

THIS LIST HAS BEEN GOING AROUND THE INTERNETS FOR OVER 12 YEARS!!!!

What's really hilarious is that while I was searching on Google, I found page after page of blog entries, journals, newsletters, and forums all quoting this same list (sometimes with extra words added) -- and all of them introduced the list as "This year's winner of the Washington Post's Mensa Invitational" -- whether the year of the post was 2003 or 2009. (I didn't look any further back than that)

So there you have it, the deathless list of neologisms. Long may they wave! :D

sw

[dalaigh lllama]

20. Truly timeless humor

Thanks for the research. Amazing how long it takes for something to make the rounds, eh?