The Washington Post recently published a contest for readers in which they were asked to supply alternative meanings for various words.
The following were some of the winning entries:
Flabbergasted - (adj.), appalled over how much weight you
have gained.
Abdicate - (v.), to give up all hope of ever having a flat stomach.
Carcinoma - (n.), a valley in California, notable for its heavy smog.
Esplanade - (v.), to attempt an explanation while drunk.
Willy-nilly - (adj.), impotent.
Negligent - (adj.), describes a condition in which you absentmindedly
answer the door in your nightie.
Lymph - (v.), to walk with a lisp.
Gargoyle - (n.), an olive-flavored mouthwash.
Bustard - (n.), a very rude Metrobus driver.
Coffee - (n.), a person who is coughed upon.
Flatulence - (n.) the emergency vehicle that picks you up after you are
run over by a steamroller.
Balderdash - (n.), a rapidly receding hairline.
Testicle - (n.), a humorous question on an exam.
Semantics - (n.), pranks conducted by young men studying for the
priesthood, including such things as gluing the pages of the priest's prayer
book together just before vespers.
Rectitude - (n.), the formal, dignified demeanor assumed by a
proctologist immediately before he examines you.
Marionettes - (n.), residents of Washington who have been jerked around
by the mayor.
Oyster - (n.), a person who sprinkles his conversation with Yiddish
expressions.
Circumvent - (n.), the opening in the front of boxer shorts.
Frisbatarianism - (n.), The belief that, when you die, your soul goes up
on the roof and gets stuck there.
The Washington Post's Style Invitational also asked readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting or changing one letter, and supply a new definition. Here are some recent winners:
Sarchasm - The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and
the reader who doesn't get it.
Reintarnation - Coming back to life as a hillbilly.
Giraffiti - Vandalism spray-painted very high.
Foreploy - Any misrepresentation about yourself for the purpose of
obtaining sex.
Inoculatte - To take coffee intravenously.
Osteopornosis - A degenerate disease.
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.
Glibido - All talk and no action.
Dopeler effect - The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they
come at you rapidly.
Intaxication - Euphoria at getting a refund from the IRS, which lasts
until you realize it was your money to start with.
And...
Ignoranus - A person who's both stupid and an asshole.
HAZARDOUS MATERIALS. INFORMATION SHEET MATERIALS SAFETY DATA SHEET
Element: Women
Symbol: Wo
Discoverer: Adam
Atomic Mass: Accepted at 53.3 kg, but known to vary from 40 – 200 kg
Occurrences: Copious quantities in all urban areas
Physical Properties
Chemical Properties
Common use
Tests
Hazards
Signs you have had too much of the 90's/00's...
You try to enter your password on the microwave.
You haven't played solitaire with real cards in years.
You have a list of 15 phone numbers to reach your family of 3.
You e-mail your colleague at the desk next to you to ask "Do you wanna go out for lunch?" and he replies "Yeah, give me five minutes".
You chat several times a day with a stranger from South America, but you haven't spoken to your next door neighbour yet this year.
Your reason for not staying in touch with friends is that they don't have e-mail.
Your idea of being organized is multicolored post-its.
You hear most of your jokes via e-mail instead of in person.
When you go home after a long day at the office you still answer the phone in a business manner.
When you make calls from home, you automatically dial "9" to get an outside line.
You've sat at the same desk for four years and worked for three different companies.
You really get excited about a 1.7% pay raise.
Your biggest loss from a computer crash is all of your jokes.
It's dark when you drive to and from work, even in the summer.
You know exactly how many days you've got left until retirement.
Interviewees, despite not having the knowledge or experience, terminate the interview when told the starting salary.
When you see a good looking, smart person, you know it must be a visitor.
Being sick is defined as not being able to walk or being in the hospital.
You're already late on the assignment you just got.
Your boss' favourite lines are:
When you've got a few minutes...
Could you fit this in...?
...in your spare time...
When you're free...
I know you're busy but...
Every week another collection envelope comes around because someone you didn't know had started is leaving.
You wonder who's going to be left to put money into your 'leaving' envelope.
Your family and friends describe your job as "works with computers".
You only have makeup for fluorescent lighting.
You read this entire list, nodding and smiling.
As you read this list, you thought about forwarding it to your "friends you send jokes to" e-mail group.
It crosses your mind that your jokes group may have seen this list already, but you can't be bothered to check, so you forward it anyway.
1950 - A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is 4/5 of the price. What is his profit?
1960 - A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is 4/5 of the price, or $80. What is his profit?
1970 - A logger exchanges a set "L" of lumber for a set "M" of money. The cardinality of a set "M" is 100. Each element is worth one dollar. Make 100 dots representing the elements of the set "M". The set "C", the cost of production, contains 20 fewer points than set "M". Represent the set "C" as a subset of set "M" and answer the following question - What is the cardinality of the set "P" for profits?
1980 - A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. Her cost of production is $80 and her profit is $20. Your assignment: Underline the number 20.
1990 - By cutting down beautiful forest trees, the logger makes $20. What do you think of this way of making a living? Topic for class participation after answering the question: How did the forest birds and squirrels feel as the logger cut down the trees? There are no wrong answers.
1996 - By laying off 40% of its loggers, a company improves its stock price from $80 to $100. How much capital gain per share does the CEO make by exercising his stock options at $80?
1997 - A company out-sources all of its loggers. The firm saves on benefits, and when demand for its product is down, the logging work force can easily be cut back. The average logger employed by the company earned $50,000, had three weeks vacation, a nice retirement plan and medical insurance. The contracted logger charges $50 an hour. Was outsourcing a good move?
1998 - A laid-off logger with four kids at home and a ridiculous alimony from his first failed marriage comes into the logging-company corporate offices and goes postal, mowing down 16 executives and a couple of secretaries, and gets lucky when he nails a politician on the premises collecting his kickback. Was outsourcing the loggers a good move for the company?
1999 - A laid-off logger serving time in Folsom for blowing away several people is being trained as a COBOL programmer in order to work on Y2K projects. What is the probability that the automatic cell doors will open on their own as of 00:00:01, 01/01/00?
2001 - A laid-off logger joins a cult. He pays 4/5 of his savings, x, to the cult leader as penance for the bad karma he carries. If he paid $240 to the cult leader, how much was his savings? Extra credit for quantum physics students: Is it probable that he will actually raise his vibrational level and disappear from the standard spectrum (as the leader promises) if he follows all the instructions of the cult leader?
Here are the winning entries from a recent contest for "new scientific theories" sponsored by Omni magazine.
The earth may spin faster on its axis due to deforestation. Just as a figure skater's rate of spin increases when the arms are brought in close to the body, the cutting of tall trees may cause our planet to spin dangerously fast.
Communist China is technologically underdeveloped because they have no alphabet. The lack of an alphabet means the Chinese cannot use "acronyms", thus, they cannot communicate their ideas at a faster rate.
The 'Why Yawning Is Contagious' Theory: You yawn to equalize the pressure on your eardrums. This pressure change outside your eardrums unbalances other people's ear pressures, so they must yawn to even it all out.
If an infinite number of rednecks riding in an infinite number of pickup trucks fire an infinite number of shotgun rounds at an infinite number of highway signs, they will eventually produce all the world's great literary works in Braille.
The quantity of consonants in the English language is absolutely constant. If consonants are omitted in one geographic area, they turn up in another. When a Bostonian "pahks" his "cah", the lost r's migrate southwest, Causing a Texan to "warsh" his car and invest in "erl wells."
When a cat is dropped, it ALWAYS lands on its feet; and when toast is dropped, it ALWAYS lands with the buttered side facing down. Therefore, I propose to strap buttered toast to the back of a cat. When dropped, the two will hover, spinning inches above the ground, probably into eternity. A "buttered-cat array" could replace pneumatic tires on cars and trucks, and "giant buttered-cat arrays" could easily allow a high-speed monorail linking New York with Chicago.
