RatBlurt's Ridictionary: For When Normal Words Fail You

By Kim A. Pederson

You might think this is a dictionary, but you'd be wrong. A dictionary is something you open or search to find or refresh your knowledge of a word you don't recognize or one whose meaning escapes you. While the format of the book mimics that of dictionaries, unless you have been reading my blog RatBlurt™, you won't find these words anywhere—at least not yet. I might have called it the "Anti-Dictionary" because the idea is for you to find non-words you like and take them elsewhere to use as you please. Sometimes, despite our best efforts, normal words fail to express the idea or thought we want to convey. Sometimes, at least in my case, those ideas or thoughts are ridiculous and so are the words invented to capture them in this Ridictionary. Feel free to enjoy the ones you find here and the RatBlurt™ blog posts in which they originated. Be careful, though. You might find yourself straying into argotnaut waters. Even worse, you might find it fun and silly and addictive, or as I would put it, funillidictive. If that happens, and I hope it does, you will be in good company…well, at least in my company. I leave the qualitative judgment up to you.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tablo Publishing
• Release date: Mar 26, 2021
• ISBN: 9781649697509

Book preview

A Word about Why This Book Is Not What It Appears to Be

You might think this is a dictionary, but you’d be wrong. A dictionary is something you open or search to find or refresh your knowledge of a word you don’t recognize or one whose meaning escapes you. While the format of the book mimics that of dictionaries, unless you have been reading my blog RatBlurt™, you won’t find these words anywhere—at least not yet. It is my fervent and extremely ridiculous hope that all these terms will one day grace the pages of the Oxford English Dictionary. So, if this is a dictionary, which it is not, it would be a ridiculous dictionary, hence the made-up name Ridictionary™.

I might have called it the Anti-Dictionary because the idea is for you to find non-words you like and take them elsewhere to use as you please. If this happens often enough and the terms here find general usage, the Ridictionary might be rendered gratuitous by the aforesaid OED. As with all creatures, though, avoiding extinction is one of RatBlurt’s prime directives. Each new edition will add words, increasing its ridiculousness and, dare I say it, continued relevance? That, if you haven’t guessed already, is my other fervent hope. You can help with that. If you do, you’ll have my immortitude [undying gratitude].

A Word about These Words

I think about words frequently, most often when I’m trying to find one to capture my thought at an exact moment. Well, to be honest, not that frequently because I only have four thoughts each year and they tend to coincide for reasons beyond my ken with the solar equinoxes and solstices. But, that said, at those infrequent moments, my physical and mental masses of extrinsic muscle all too frequently get abducted by a creature of the feline persuasion, that is, the cat gets my tongue.

As someone unknown to us once said, Necessity is the mother of invention (invention, apparently, needing no more than a single parent). I must agree with this proverb since whenever I can’t think of or find a word I need, I make one up. For example, necessity is the mother of invention seems unnecessarily wordy to me, especially in the adjectival sense. So, I might write something like he or she experienced a ‘materconcoctarequisite’ inspiration. Potential obtufuscation [obtuse obfuscation] aside, it captures the idea much more succinctly and musically, at least to my admittedly vainjudiced [vain and prejudiced] ear. (I could go on and on, as you likely sense by now.)

Anyway, I am not alone in the practice of making up words. Individuals and cultures do it all the time, and, voila, we have slang. Very simply, slang words are not considered part of the standard vocabulary and are used very informally by a group of people. For an especially painful example of this, watch the Marlon Brando film The Wild One. In it, Brando plays Johnny Strabler, the leader of the Black Rebels Motorcycle Club (in which, as you might have guessed, nary a black Black Rebel is to be seen). Brando spouts slang like you’re too square or that’s cornball style or now if you’re gonna stay cool you got to wail, you got to put something down, you got to make some jive. This makes me wonder if the movie producers started out with a film about beret-sporting beatniks snapping fingers and being cool and then decided to change it to a biker movie, the only alteration being the turtlenecks and loafers getting swapped for leather jackets and boots.

I realize now that I will never lack the right expression or phrase. I am surrounded by fellow argotnauts [word adventurers]. If I can’t think of a good term, they will, given the proclivity of humans to expand their language in creative ways. I am comforted also by our having, should any instance of patoisperplexity [slang incomprehension] occur, many online dictionaries to help us out. The Urban Dictionary is one and the Online Slang Dictionary another. For example, from the former I learned today that battery operated boyfriend or bob describes something one uses when you don’t have a steady male companion.

Okay. I probably didn’t need to know that. Sometimes, it seems, being at a loss for words is not bad. Sometimes, that is. Sometimes it is, if not bad, then annoying and frustrating. Sometimes, despite our best efforts, normal words fail to express the idea or thought we want to convey. Sometimes, at least in my case, those ideas or thoughts are ridiculous and so are the words invented to capture them in this Ridictionary. Feel free to enjoy the ones you find here and the RatBlurt™ blog posts in which they originated. Be careful, though. You might find yourself straying into argotnaut waters. Even worse, you might find it fun and silly and addictive, or as I would put it, funillidictive. If that happens, and I hope it does, you will be in good company…well, at least in my company. I leave the qualitative judgment up to you.

And a final note. The blog entries here appear, except for minor editing, as they did when first posted. As such, they may contain information or references that are out of date. What can I say? Despite what that French guy said, the more things change, the more they change.

A Word about What to Expect

So how does this all work? In each entry in this dictionary that is not a dictionary you will see these elements:

The word itself and what form it takes grammatically (if I can figure it out), e.g., verb, noun, etc.

My humble attempt at providing the phonetic pronunciation of the word

The definition or definitions for the word, all products of my often-fevered imagination

An example of usage, which, rather than taking the saner dictionary route of using a sentence or two, comes in the form of the RatBlurt blog entry from whence the word comes. This word appears in highlight like thisjust to make sure you can relish it just a bit longer as well as imprint it on your brain.

Other RatBlurt-coined fictords [fictional words] that appear within a blog entry will be marked in red. Their definitions appear, in alphabestical order of course, elsewhere in the Ridictionary.

I think that covers everything, except of course the requisite plug to visit the website, sign up to receive new blogs by email, and leave words of glowing praise.

There. Plug made. And now, to crib from Monty Python, for something completely ridiculous.

abominalize  verb  \ah `bahmb ih nah lies

¹

The act of cannibalizing something for a use never intended for it and in the process making it abominable.

Etymology: abominable + cannibalize

The Aches and Pains of Outrageous Fortune (June 12, 2012)



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While I was attempting a reasonable facsimile of exercise this morning, the phrase suffer the aches and pains of outrageous fortune jumped into my brain (Brownian motion at work no doubt). This, of course, abominalizes the famous Hamlet slings and arrows line from the even more famous to be or not to be speech. So, what is outrageous fortune anyway, and why do we suffer its slings and arrows?

The Shakespeare Resource Center offers a line-by-line analysis of Hamlet's entire woe, is me declamation. Here’s what they have to say about slings and arrows:

Some editors have argued that the original word was stings rather than slings, although slings and arrows makes for a better rhetorical construction. Slings and arrows imply missile weapons that can not only strike from a distance but can miss their mark and strike someone unintended. That would fit with the capriciousness suggested by the phrase outrageous fortune. The metaphor also brings up the demoralizing aspect of enduring attacks without being able to respond effectively—whether from archers, snipers, artillery, or even guerrilla tactics. Outrageous in this speech denotes violent or atrocious. In this usage, fortune denotes the good or ill that befalls man [women, apparently, are not subject to fortune].

The phrase the demoralizing aspect of enduring attacks without being able to respond effectively certainly fits with workout-related aches and pains (A&Ps).

On a lighter note (anything to get my mind off the A&Ps), Outrageous Fortune is also the title of a New Zealand comedy/drama TV series:

The central plot [of the series] is that a family of criminals decide to go straight after the patriarch is jailed. Like the show itself, episodes take their names from Shakespeare quotations. The main characters each walk a fine line between right and wrong according to their respective values—the law, the criminal code of honor, loyalty to family, and respectability.

On the show’s website, they have a questionnaire for fans about one of the characters that asks the following questions.

In the future, Cheryl will

become a lesbian?

turn Hoochie Mama into a global fashion success?

move to the Gold Coast?

somehow find Wolf and start all this over again?

get drunk and accidentally hook up with Eric?

find herself a toyboy?

I think I've just discovered the perfect way to push my often extrenorable A&Ps to the rear of my cognitive bus: get comfortable in my patent-pending distractalounger and queue up Episode 1 of Outrageous Fortune on Netflix, entitled appropriately Slings and Arrows:

When career criminal Wolfgang West gets put away for four years, his wife Cheryl decides it’s time for her family to go straight. But can the Wests change the habits of a lifetime?

I feel much better already.

(Image: Edwin Booth as Hamlet, ca. 1870. Public Domain.)

adfrustraniac  noun  \add fruh `stray knee ack

A person characterized by raging lunacy brought about by the cumulative aggravation evoked by having to endure endless advertisements to view preferred content on television.

Etymology: advertisement + frustration + maniac

a new way to watch: binging and purgetizing (june 23, 2016)

The advent of the term binge-watch is recent as words go, appearing somewhere between 1995 and 2000. In 2015, it was declared Word of the Year by Collins Dictionary, The Guardian reports that "our relentless consumption of shows such as House of Cards and Breaking Bad led its usage to increase by 200% last year." As you likely know, binge-watch is what it sounds like: the unrestrained and often excessive indulgence (that’s the binge part) in observing TV series as a spectator (that’s the watch part).



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So, who gave us yet another way to miss out on sleep? According to Joe Nocera, Netflix, that’s who. In his New York Times Magazine article Screen Grab, Joe tells us the pioneering DVD-rental and streaming company destroyed the old way we watch TV and helped unleash the new ways. Indeed, Netflix started the binge-streaming phenomenon when it became the first company to put an entire season of a show online at once. And this is only the start. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings says that all TV will move to the Internet, and linear TV will cease to be relevant over the next 20 years, like fixed-line telephones. Perhaps the most telling quote in the article comes from an analyst who said, Once people start watching shows that don’t have commercials, they never want to go back.

Hear, hear. And, to repeat, hear, hear. If you’ve ever tried to watch CNN, Fox News, or MSNBC, you have probably experienced, as I have, adfrustranity. Not only are the ads on these channels incessant, they are incessantly long (thank you, Big Pharma), incessantly inane (as in Jim needs more life insurance), or incessantly suspicious (ambulance-chasing law firms). The worst offenders seem to cable-based networks like the news outlets and AMC, SciFi, etc., etc.

There’s a better way. Either go the Netflix BW route or change your model. Here’s an example. According to Variety, AMC took in $765 million in advertising revenue in 2014. In 2015, AMC entertainment programming drew an average of 3.9 million viewers each night. If AMC asked its viewers to pay around 54 cents per night for their viewing pleasure, under $200 per year, it would take in the same amount of revenue. (Many probably already pay this to see shows ad-free through Amazon, Hulu, and the like.) Indeed, AMC might take in much more as this purgetizing would bring back all the adfrustraniacs with the allure of peaceful, uninterrupted viewing of their favorite programs. I think it’s time to start lobbying for this movement to start in earnest. Who’s with me?

(Image: The Night Watch, Rembrandt, 1642, Public Domain.)

adfrustranity  noun  \add fruh `strayn ih tee

A state of raging lunacy brought about by the cumulative aggravation of having to endure endless advertisements to view preferred content on television.

Etymology: advertisement + frustration + insanity

See adfrustraniac.

amorance  noun  \`aahm mohr ahns

An attempt to move another person by physical and/or verbal actions into a state of being receptive to bodily interactions such as kissing, touching, and/or sexually congressing [or is it caucusing—I can never remember].

Etymology: amorous + advance

See happistructions.

ancestrangst  noun  \`ann ses traingst

Feeling of anxiety regarding the accomplishments of one’s ancestors being overstated, misrepresented, or just plain made up.

Etymology: ancestry + angst

Oh, the thane of it! (september 8, 2015)



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Illusions sometimes die in hard, messy, neuron-warping ways. My heritage on my dad’s side is Norwegian. My grandfather was born in Kristiania (Oslo) in the late 1800s. So, I have often referred, overly pretentiously always, to my Viking genes and to how the Vikings are the forbearetects of everything in the modern world. The pyramids in Egypt? I would say, oh, the Vikings did that. As with most things, in such instances I knew naught of what I spake.

Various truths have been grinding down my Nordic grandeurlucinations little by little for some time now. Here are the big disenchantbombs:

The Vikings did not wear horned helmets. Rather than donning the magnificent, fear-inducing headwear touted by such icons as Hagar the Horrible, they sported boring metal bowls sometimes ignominiously uglified with a nose guard.

The marauding Vikings of song and tale were mostly Danes and Swedes. Norway was pretty much a backwater when all the action was happening (800 to 1100 AD approximately). If it weren’t for Erik the Red and Leif Erikson, we Norwegians would have practically zilch Norsetereity. (Well, as with most things here, that's a bit of an exaggeration. We did found the city of Dublin in Ireland in the 900s, discovered Iceland, Greenland, and America, called Vinland, before anyone else, and made it first to the South Pole. Oh, and did I mention we built the pyramids?)

Norway did not become a truly independent country until 1905 when the United Kingdoms of Sweden and Norway officially separated.

So, what brought on all this ancestrangst? A 1944 adventure novel written by Frans Bengtsson called The Long Ships (also called Red Orm after the main character). I ran across the book’s description on one of the innumerable must-read lists out there and had to check it out. Novelist Michael Chabon, in his introduction to The Long Ships, describes it as a work that stands ready, given the chance, to bring lasting pleasure to every single human being on the face of the earth. He also notes, for what it’s worth, that he has only met three other people who have read the book.

Red Orm is a Swede from Scania who goes on many adventures, gathering glory and riches for himself and his family. The Norwegians pretty much get left out of it. I’m sure they would have been in the thick of everything, outshining the Swedes and Danes in all words and deeds, had they not been otherwise occupied in completing their more important and long-lasting architectural commissions for the pharaohs (see above).

(Image: Sea-faring Danes depicted invading England. Illuminated illustration from the 12th century Miscellany on the Life of St. Edmund. Public Domain.)

anklangst  noun  \`ayn cull aingst

Feeling of anxiety regarding inadvertently witnessing the exposure of an immodest amount of the human ankle.

Etymology: ankle + angst

i’d rather not have one (may 15, 2016)

Everyone needs help sometimes, especially in putting the spark back into relationships teetering on the edge of guttering. Guttering is a great word, isn’t it? It acts as a gerund for the verb gutter that denotes the melted wax that runs down a candle. The intransitive verb gutter means, in turn, to flow in rivulets as in wax down a candle, to incline downward in a draft or wind as candle flames do, or to burn feebly as again in a candle. So why all this waxing ineloquent? Because one solution to relationship woes is to get an extra-long courting candle.

Well, that’s a bit off, really, as am I. The said extended taper has more to do with winning a mate than derifting a chasming coupling. This bit of wisdom comes to us from the actress Kate Beckinsale via Vanity Fair. Beckinsale stars in the film Love and Friendship, adapted from a Jane Austen short story by the same name. In association with the film, Vanity Fair offers Kate Beckinsale’s Guide to 18th Century Dating Rules or as the video clip puts it, How to Get a Guy in the 1800s. Here’s a list of her tips, all aimed at women. (Men, of course, never need or heed advice on anything at any time.)

A lady should be expected to shine in the art of conversation, but not too brightly. (So, no four-syllable words like…yikes, I don’t know any four-syllable words.)

Make optimum use of the courting candle, by which families allow couples to talk until the said illuminative device burns below a certain level (no word on how the candle stops conversation at that point).

A lady should finish her toilet before entering the room for dancing (toilet meaning the process of washing, grooming, and arranging oneself for the day’s activities or for a special occasion and probably that other thing, too).

A lady never serves herself from a buffet line (I can understand this aversion; I’ve been to Vegas).

No lady should be left unattended in public circumstances such as a ball. (Very much like luggage in an airport, Beckinsale adlibs, it might explode.)



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A lady, when crossing the street, should not raise her skirt with both hands as it exposes too much ankle. (I guess men of honor witnessing such lewd behavior might suffer from terminal anklangst. Can’t have that.)

At the end of the short video, Beckinsale looks back on the list and says, And that’s how you get a man in the 1800s. That sounds horrible. I’d rather not have one. Apparently, author Jane agreed with her. She had one proposal during her life. The suitor was Harris Bigg-Wither. She initially considered his proposal from the first look at the purse perspective and accepted, even though HBW was a large, plain-looking man who spoke little, stuttered when he did speak, was aggressive in conversation, and almost completely tactless. She woke up the next morning and snapped out of it. I guess thinking of the potential snigger-factor of being named Jane Bigg-Wither was more than she could contemplate, causing her to switch to the fish/bicycle relationship axiom and say, in concert with Beckinsale, I’d rather not have one. Given what I know of males from the inside looking out, who can blame them?

(Image: Portrait of Jane Austen, c. 1810, by her sister Cassandra. Public Domain.)

anticurvophile  noun  \ann tie `cuhrv ah fyl

An individual who loves to oppose the theory that the earth’s horizon curves, i.e., that the earth is round and not flat.

Etymology: anti- [against] + curve + -phile [one having a fondness or affinity for or a strong attraction to]

See planetarsphericity.

antiquologist  noun  \ann teek `ah low gihst

Someone who specializes in the study and/or acquisition of objects belonging to earlier periods.

Etymology: antique + -ologist [specialist]

Tchotchkes from the Crypt (May 30, 2018)

In his book Time Travel, James Gleick mentions an article from the November 1936 Scientific American titled Today—Tomorrow. The story transported its readers to the year 8113 on the day the Crypt of Civilization, sealed in 1936, was to be opened and its contents revealed. The purpose was to disclose to the waiting world the civilization of an ancient and almost forgotten people.

The author of that transportive piece created such a crypt on the campus of Oglethorpe University in Georgia. In it, he put newspapers, encyclopedias, foods (including chewing gum), miniature automobile models, and a complete model of the US capitol building which, within a half-dozen centuries, will probably have disappeared completely. Then he added a set of Lincoln Logs, a sheet of aluminum foil, some women’s stockings, an automobile distributor cap, one lady’s breast form, Mickey Mouse, a bottle of beer, and the recorded voices of Franklin Roosevelt, Adolf Hitler, and King Edward of England. The crypt was finished and sealed in May 1940. The headline from one newspaper story about the event read They buried the twentieth century today.

The idea of a time crypt or time capsule is simple. They are intended as a historic cache of goods or information, usually intended as a method of communication with future people and to help future archaeologists, anthropologists, or historians. The practice dates to the ancient Egyptians, although to be fair, they were pyramidizing artifacts for the afterlife rather than the hereafter. Time capsules are everywhere in our world now and even out of this world on the Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft. Most contain, according to one critic, useless junk of little real value to the aforementioned antiquologists.

Gleick is not so much interested in what we put in time capsules. He’s more intrigued, as I am, by the idea that we can bury time. He calls the capsules a special version of time travel and a special kind of foolishness. Gleick describes the impulse as reverse nostalgia, which makes sense to me. The chronointerrists (CIs) experience a pleasant recollection of the present by imagining their time capsules being opened in the future and their present/now past being similarly appreciated by the chronoexhumists. One can easily imagine, at least I can, the thoughts running through the heads of the people in Oklahoma who, in 1957, buried a Plymouth Belvedere, a five-gallon can of gasoline, and some Schlitz beer in a concrete vault.

Gleick writes that the CIs forget that we already have a mechanism for transmitting information about our lives and times to the future: culture. We have books, art, buildings, libraries, museums, the internet, etc., etc., etc. The CIs retort, in his mind, What good will Wikipedia be when the lights go out?

They may have a point. On the other hand, what good is a time capsule if you can’t remember where you buried it and your GPS isn’t working? All this talk of the future being apocaliminated has me worried. It also has given me an idea. I’m going to find out where that Plymouth is buried in Oklahoma, mark it on a physical map, and bury the map for safekeeping. That way, should the universe decide our time is up, I’ll at least know where to get a beer before the final curtain falls. I find that comforting somehow.

aphroditize  verb  \aff row `die ties

The act of turning someone or something into a love object.

Etymology: Aphrodite + -ize [to cause to be or become or conform to or be like or resemble]

See apollonize.

apocaliminate  verb  \ah pahk ah `lihm meh n8

To cause everyone and everything to disappear by means of a great disaster, e.g., (a) cosmic: a giant meteor striking the earth, (b) environmental: our atmosphere and/or ocean catching on fire, or (c) extraterrestrial: the Vogons destroying our planet to make way for an intergalactic bypass (see The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy).

Etymology: apocalypse + eliminate

See antiquologist.

apollonize verb  \ah `pah low nies

The act of making something unbearably bright and shiny.

Etymology: Apollo + -ize [to cause to be or become or conform to or be like or resemble]

The original stoner? (november 5, 2012)

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day today is gorgonize. I didn't know this was a verb. It means to have a paralyzing or mesmerizing effect on: stupefy, petrify, which pretty much describes my effect on others at parties. The word comes, of course (or maybe not of course), from the Gorgons, those lovely mythological Greek creatures with snakes for hair, brass hands, and boar’s tusks.



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I was surprised to learn that there was more than one Gorgon. I thought Medusa, the one killed by Perseus, was the sole stone sister. The other two Gorgons, Stheno and Euryale, were immortal and Medusa was not. (I guess she slept late the day the life-everlasting pills were handed out.) But then Medusa was the only one who could turn people to stone with a glance, which I’m sure her sisters envied big time. As the story

goes, Medusa was allegedly (got to love that in a myth) raped by the sea god Poseidon in the Temple of Athena. Athena was furious with Medusa and changed her into a terrible monster, along with her sisters Stheno and Euryale, who happened to be in the neighborhood. Talk about collateral damage. One wonders, doesn’t one, why Athena took out her anger on the granite girls rather than the sea-going perp.

Anyway, back to the word gorgonize. After seeing it, I thought it might be fun to make verbs out of other Greek god names. Here goes.

Apollonize– to make something unbearably bright and shiny

Hadesize– to make something the opposite of unbearably bright and shiny

Dionysusize– to get someone inebriated

Aphroditize

– to turn someone into a love object

Zeusize– to strike someone or something with lightning bolts

Okay, this is not working at all. I think I've just gorgonized (in the stupefy sense) all my readers. I'll stop now.

(Image: Medusa by Arnold Böcklin, c. 1878. Public Domain.)

astoundicity  noun  \ah stown `diss ih tee

The quality of something being astounding because of its audacity, as in wow, I can’t believe they had the gall to say that!

The quality of something being astounding because of its profundity, as in wow, their incredible insight and understanding just blows me away!

Etymology: astounding + audacity

The thundershirt (june 29, 2012)

I am constantly amazed at how things in the consumer world jump out of the blue and smack you in the face with their astoundicity (and maybe I shouldn’t be given how little attention I pay to it, usually). Yesterday, I was at the pet store to buy cat litter for my invisible friend the Yiking when an end display demanded my attention. More specifically, these words caught my eye: Make Your Dog a Thunderdog...Calm & Fearless.

The product that goes with this text, the Thundershirt™, looks like any other doggie coat (to my untrained eye). This one, however, uses gentle constant pressure to calm your dog, effectively aiding anxiety, fearfulness, barking, and more. Here’s the official list of ills purportedly prevented by the Thundershirt (some with before and after videos):

Fear of thunder/fireworks

Separation anxiety

Crate training

Problem barking

Hyperactivity

Leash pulling

And [of course] more!

Don’t worry, you cat people (of which I am one), there’s a Thundershirt for cats also, which supposedly takes care of these feline issues:

Vet visits [we could use this, believe me]

Car travel

Grooming

General fearfulness

Litter box problems

Much [of course] more!



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How does it work? The Thundershirt’s website states that gentle pressure has a calming effect on the nervous system. Among other uses of such pressure, it notes that veterinarians use pressure to relax cattle when they are administering vaccinations. (I'm trying to imagine how vets might accomplish this and...no, let’s not go there.)

The Thundershirt sells for $39.95 (free shipping!) and has a money-back guarantee. Not only do you get a refund, but they take the shirt you return and donate it to a vet or an animal shelter. They have testimonials from owners, vets, trainers, and shelters. It all sounds above board, really, and well-intentioned even if it proves ineffective. I know from firsthand experience that animal anxiety is real and anything that helps reduce it, especially without medication, is a good thing.

Still, if all it takes is gentle pressure to alleviate fear...I’m eying my cat and the roll of duct tape on the shelf right now. I don’t think he likes where I’m going with this.

(Image: Gunnar Kaasen and Balto, the lead dog on the last relay team of the 1925 serum run to Nome. By Brown Brothers. Public Domain.)

audiopendage  noun  \aw dee oh `pen dajsh

A peripheral extension of an animal body that captures sounds and transmits that information to the brain. These are known colloquially as ears or, less commonly, lugholes.

Etymology: audio + appendage

the curse of self-consistency (february 11, 2016)

The world of physicists and astrophysicists is abuzz today because of a faint chirp. What’s the big deal, you might ask? I can hear mockingbirds sing right outside my window and it’s a whole lot more interesting than a sound burp from an event that took place a billion light years away and a billion years ago. The chirp, if you haven’t heard (DOH!), was the sound of two black holes bashing into each other and becoming one.

The grirp (gravitational chirp) just recorded is sci-fabulous because, according to The New York Times, it fulfills the last prophecy of Einstein’s general theory of relativity and because, in the words of one jazzed professor, Astronomy grew ears. We’ve never had ears before.

As someone with overlarge audiopendages, I’m tempted to send my condolences to astronomy but will refrain. This news does make me wonder what the earth might have been like one billion years ago when the two black hole event horizons banged into each other with the force of a billion trillion suns exploding. (Kim Jong Un must be way jealous.) As it turns out, we were all one back then. Well, not we because there were no plants or animals at the time. We were one because all the land on Earth was gathered into a super-continent named Rodinia (formerly Pangaea).



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In a related aside, I’m reading Charles Yu’s quirky, fun, and, yes, sci-fabulous novel titled How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe. (Charles was here in Key West a few years back when the Literary Seminar chose sci-fi as its theme genre.) The lead character in the novel is also Charles Wu (who has met 37 versions of himself in different galaxies, including, one presumes, the book’s author). Charles is a time-machine repairman tending to various chronotransports that other people have rented to go back and fix their broken lives. Charles tells these people what they don’t want to hear, that because of the basics of Novikovian self-consistency what they want to do is impossible.

But what if it wasn’t? If it were possible to change the past, I would rent a TM-31 Recreational Time Travel Device, grab a very large tube of tectonic Super Glue, go back one billion years, and mend all the cracks in the super-continent such that it never breaks apart. If I could do that, today we would all be Rodinians, speaking Rodinian, living as one nation, under the deity or nondeity of our choice, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Wouldn’t that be something? There but for that darn Novikovian self-consistency might go us. Perhaps the TM-32 RTTD will resolve this issue. One can only hope.

(Image: Poster for the film The Time Machine (1960). Public domain.)

bacterialize  verb  \back `tier ree ah lies

To add round, spiral, or rod-shaped single-celled prokaryotic microorganisms, sometimes disease-inducing and sometimes health-improving, to something previously free of them.

Etymology: bacteria + -al [of, relating to, or characterized by] + -ize [to cause to be or become or conform to or be like or resemble]

say hello to our little friends (march 29, 2016)

I’m sure it’s been a burning question in many people’s minds for centuries: What really happens when you drop food on the floor? Or put another way, is the five-second rule (FSR) myth or fact? Since you may not be familiar with the FSR (a 2003 survey noted that 56% of men and 70% of women queried knew of it), the rule is simply that food dropped on the floor is safe to eat, i.e., not chowdaminated, if picked up before five seconds have passed. Sadly, given the amount of food our culture already wastes, the rule is a myth. If bacteria occupy said floor, and it’s likely since they are everywhere, then the chowdamination occurs pretty much on contact.

At least that’s what Melissa Hogenboom of BBC Earth tells us. (This is a fascinating website, by the way. It also tackles such tough questions as Why don’t we see baby pigeons? Do we really eat spiders at night? and Can your plant hear you talk?) At any one time, Melissa tells us, more than 9,000 species of microbes, including 7,000 types of bacteria, lurk