Fictionary

I just did a quick check, and I have used every single word in the English language at least once. The magic moment occurred on Monday when my wife suggested that our watching hockey playoffs might be less important than, say, doing something else, and I correctly assessed her assessment as being dehortatory.

We might have watched a Canadiens playoff victory together, had

they not lost, but the point is that her dehortatory position was clearly dehortatory, and it behooved me to identify it as

being dehortatory.

(bonus: if you say 'dehortatory' often enough, unpleasant stuff gets dislodged from your throat. It seems that saying 'dehortatory' has a cleansing effect that isn't mentioned in the dictionary. Dehortatory. There, something else just came up.)

Back to the point. Now that we (and I say 'we' because you are in my thoughts daily) are out of words, we must invent some new ones. Don't try to dehortatize us out of it. We will start with a couple of words that have somehow been overlooked by the likes of Noah Webster, an overrated crossword puzzle solver who probably should have kept his telemarketing job.

blogey - Tiger Woods, taking one stroke too many.

Cinco de Mayonnaise - a Kraft marketing promotion that rewards you for buying more jars of sandwich spread than you could possibly use.

gorillagarious - enjoying the company of bloggers, evangelists, chimpanzees and other members of the Hominidae family, but especially silverbacks.

grossundheit - the stuff on your hand after you sneeze.

hamnesia - ordering dinner in a restaurant, and failing to remember that it contains food that your religion forbids.

percolooter - someone who steals coffee from work to use at home.

Santa closet - a small room full of red suits.

spibble - salivary emissions that spread over the front of your jacket during your trip home from the dentist.

teflawn - that part of the yard where the long grass just springs up again, no matter how many times you run the mower over it.

vamooch - someone who borrows money from you, and is never seen again.

Waltzheimer's - your paper-thin excuse for not getting up to dance.

And for the rest of you hockey fans, Dave of Dave Mows Grass contributes this insightful gem of Maple Leafs trivia:
betrade - What you feel when the Leafs trade their next two first-round picks for Phil Kessel and then finish 29th.

There, we're marginally more literate already. Click the comment thing and toss in your own word, or email it to us at coopergreen@canada.com. We'll add it to the list. We know we want to.

May 20 is Draw Mohammed Day

Don't know what this is about? Here is a good perspective.

"...She's just sort of a bigoted woman." - Gordon Brown (London, April 28, 2010)

Spurred by the parasitic instincts of the paparazzi, it can be argued that the sea of cameras and recording devices that constantly surround those in the public spotlight are a scourge, a current-day phenomenon that diminishes us all. And that may very well be true. Gordon Brown would probably agree, all because of a tiny Radio Shack microphone that he failed to remove after a kiss 'n fondle appearance among his constituents just before last month's elections.

On the other hand, those British voters who got a little schadenfreude tickle from the whole thing might well argue that they now know something about Mr. Brown that they otherwise might never have known, and they didn't like what they discovered. Let's assume that is the prevailing sentiment; the election results certainly bear it out. Wouldn't it have been nice, then, if some of history's more quotable individuals had been microphone-enhanced at key times? The inevitable eavesdropping opportunities might have revealed some attitude-altering insight into some of history's more notable figures:

• "I've been a fan of yours for years, Mr. Simpson. What would it take to get you to autograph a football for me?" - Judge Ito (Los Angeles, 1995)
• "Of course I can do a mural, I do tons of them. But on the ceiling? Nobody told me you wanted it on the [frickin'] ceiling! Do I look like a spider?" - Michelangelo (Sistine Chapel, 1508)
• "I know this is awfully short notice, but we're going to need a lot more cake."- Marie Antoinette (Paris, 1789)
• "Honey, this fertilizer is full of ammonium nitrate. Where's the chicken manure I asked you to buy?" - Mrs. Faisal Shahzad (New York, April 2010)
• "I'm very happy doing odd jobs around the cathedral, please don't think I'm ungrateful. But those bell ropes? Every day? I'm a hunchback, for Pete's sake." - Quasimodo (Notre Dame, 1831)
• "No, Timmy's fine. He didn't fall down a mine shaft. I'm trying to tell you that he's been in the bathroom a long time, he's probably sitting on my water bowl, and I'm thirsty." - Lassie (Nevada, 1956)
• "Does this moustache make me look psychotic?"- Adolf Hitler (Berlin, 1932)
• "Hey, I'm just messing with you, Buzz. Your air hose is fine." - Neil Armstrong to Buzz Aldren (moon, July 20, 1969)
• "Well, of course you still can't walk. I'm just an evangelist." - Oral Roberts

I'm sure you have your own contributions, and I hope you'll share them. This is your chance to be a cheap microphone! Seize the moment! Use Comments or email me, coopergreen@canada.com!

Explanations that I am rehearsing, just in case the conversation goes in that direction.

• There's a great story behind my overbite. You'll love this. Back in the day, when all flashlights carried four 'D' batteries and they were uniformly heavy and awkward, I used to need one when I took my bulldog - Chiclet - on her nightly poopwalk, so I could pick up her mess afterward. Well. One winter, when it was absolutely pitch black by 4 o'clock every day, she came down with Projectile Diarrhea. It lasted six weeks, and was terribly hard to clean up. So I developed a system. Here's how it worked: I would put the flashlight in my mouth, and hang on to Chiclet's leash with my left hand. Then, with my right ...

• I'm glad you asked about that particular scratch on my fender, because even though it looks quite minor, it represents one of the most terrifying events I've been unfortunate enough to have been involved with in years. Let me just say these four words: drunk gardener wielding a rake. I'm not counting indefinite articles. I'm sure you can see how that very scene portends a dire occurrence with grave consequences, and I count myself as fortunate beyond words that this brutal scar was inflicted on my car rather than on one of my vital organs, had the window been down and the car not moving, and if he hadn't been lying down. It was just an ordinary Tuesday and I was driving south on Westchapel Crescent ...

• I see you have some photographs of your family in your wallet ... that's okay, I don't need to see them. I'm sure your kids are great. But I must tell you something that will really give you pause. Do you know that I still carry the picture that came with my wallet when I bought it? There it is, right there. Still in its original window. She's lovely, isn't she? I thought she had the most winning smile, so I wrote to Buxton, the wallet people, and told them exactly which wallet design I had purchased, when and where I bought it, the colour and so forth, so that there could be no mistaking whose picture that might be. Her name's Wendy. They wouldn't give me her address, but Google is a wonderful thing ...

• Do you mean the Buford Stinkberry who works in the funeral home? That Buford Stinkberry? Well I can tell you a few stories about Mister Stinkberry that will curl your hair if you don't mind having your ears scorched. I simply don't understand why he is that way, because he comes from a nice Protestant family, although they're working class. Now I'm not prejudiced in any way, but there was this particular funeral at the home, and one of the family was a young lady, rather attractive for a brown person. I wouldn't say black because she didn't seem athletic. Maybe a sort of dusky Filipino now that I think of it, because she was always tending to things ...

• My, that's a very noticeable mole pattern you have on your cheek. Quite large, really. Birth defect? It's a little like mine, which is in my armpit rather than on my cheek, and I would show it to you if the lighting were a little better. Let's step over to the breakfast nook, there's lots of light there. You'll get a kick out of this, because it looks a bit like an armadillo ...

Booger

On the occasion of Mrs. Fangbolt, from two streets over, bringing her Mastiff / Rottweiler cross into our neighbourhood. Booger's leash is safely stored in Mrs. F's front hall, in case she needs it.

(Booger darts across the road and leaps our low fence, which encloses the yard where our harmless little terrier Maxie is sniffing a tulip)
"Booger, C'mere! Don't worry he's very friendly. Absolutely loves little dogs, dontcha, Booger?"

(Booger mulches an entire bed of tulips in his attempt to puncture Maxie's larynx)
"Booger, NO! BAD Booger! I don't understand it, he has never done that before." She means, of course, that Booger usually kills with his first bite, and she can't understand how he missed the mark this time.

(With Maxie safely concealed in a crawlspace under the house, Booger is now free to hump my wife's leg)
"BAD Booger! NAUGHTY Booger! Oh, he's being a bad dog today!" This is Mrs. Fangbolt's grudging acknowledgment of the fact that Booger's inferior humping skills have failed to cause a pregnancy in my wife's leg.

(Booger takes a dump on our Welcome mat, and Mrs. Fangbolt makes no cursory gesture to withdraw a doggy-do bag from her pocket, because she never uses them)
"Booger, NO! Oh, I'm so EMBARRASSED! Good thing he did it there, that should clean up nicely." This reflects Mrs. F's abandonment of any responsibility, coupled with her sincere hope that we won't attempt to clean it until she is gone because she absolutely gags when there is poo.

(Booger, having failed at gardening, murder and cross-pollination, but having successfully offloaded his Dog Chow, recognizes that it's time to leave)
"Attaboy, Booger. Such a nice day, isn't it? Byeeee!" This diversionary tactic indicates that Booger's overwhelming dogness will force Mrs. F to add our street to her No Fly list. We breathe a sigh of relief as she leaves, and retrieve Maxie from the crawlspace. We will egg her house after dark tonight.