(notes on my love affair)
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This week, let’s take a break from politics and other viruses to talk about one of my favorite things: English. I love our language. But loving English can be hard to do, much like trying to love Boris Karloff, or kale.

English is beautiful, but tough. For every rule, there’s a “but.” An “unless.” An “except when.”

At the end of the day, my conclusion is this: you can’t learn English; you can only memorize it.

For example, take the letter sequence OUGH. This four-letter construction collects pronunciations like Imelda Marcos collects shoes. Witness:

• Bough
• Bought
• Through
• Though
• Thought
• Tough
• Cough

English is fraught (frought? frawt?) with such. But we’re taught (tought? taut?) to put up with it and learn how to speak English, or at least we were until social media and shallow texting came along, firing up their jihad to de-literate any creature with opposable thumbs.

Thankfully, there are a few holdouts. Jeopardy, Wheel of Fortune, and Family Feud come to mind. On the other side of the battlefield are facebook, Hee Haw, intentionally misspelled products (Publix, Froot Loops, Chik-fil-A), and any show where anybody begins any sentence with “It don’t…”.

Of course, the family pastime that arguably pays the greatest homage to English is the board game Scrabble. Scrabble is a fun board game in which the main goal is to try and keep a straight while claiming that there really are words like DRAZM, JIK, and QIDGE.

Somebody somewhere who has way too much time on their hands has determined that the absolute best possible word that could be played in Scrabble is this 15-letter mouthful:
OXYPHENBUTAZONE

Playing that word would net you 1,458 points! And if you tack on points for any intersecting words, your single turn score could rise to 1,778, and your spouse would begin filing divorce papers.

So, in our ongoing effort to help keep English fun and sexy, while socially distancing, here are some things about our language that we wonder about, or need, or just now made up.

Definitions, As Far As You Know

• Largesse: a letter of the alphabet that has just let itself go
• Infidel: An outfidel who shuns company
• Prepared: an apple right before you skin it
• Regret: becoming an egret again
• Pretense: that feeling you get just before somebody irritates you
• Classical guitarist: unemployed musician
• WalMart: a place that sells room dividers (usually located next to a DoorMart and a WindowMart)
• Prelate: early
• Jump the shark: what the woman in the first scene of Jaws forgot to do
• Propane: being in favor of pane
• Doing marijuana: a phrase only used by people who’ve never smoked marijuana
• Refrigerator: a device that frigerates again
• Pretentious ass: anybody who disagrees with you politically
• Freight train: what people always say the tornado sounded like
• Prosthodontist: a dentist who owns more than one boat
• Bipartisan (1): a political pundit who’ll sleep with anybody
• Bipartisan (2): a liar
• The American Southeast: the part of the map TV weather people always stand in front of
• Overture: more than just your average ture
• Underpaid: schoolteacher
• Repair: what happens after both members of a couple apologize
• Irreconcilable differences: what happens when the repair fails

Words That Sound Dirty But Aren’t

• Hot Pocket
• Penal colony
• Fenestration
• Orville Redenbacher’s Snack Size
• Uvula
• Beaver Cleaver
• Analyst
• Funk mixtape
• Mother Fuddrucker
• Plate tectonics
• Goat cheese
• Sump pump
• Poop deck
• Dongle required
• Fisted withers
• Masticator
• Anthony Weiner (okay, bad example)

Drive-By’s (random observations)

• How come flammable and inflammable mean the same thing?
• In Britain, people don’t live on a street; they live in a street. Isn’t that dangerous?
• If somebody compliments you, have you been sulted?
• What kind of bait do you use to catch fish sticks?
• Why do TV news shows always splatter “Breaking News!” banners across the screen? Of course it’s breaking – it’s news. If it already happened, it’s not news.
• Can you hire an impersonal secretary?
• Why are we supposed to say “an historical moment” but not “an hot dog?”
• Beneath the forest floor, is there a forest basement?
• On Halloween, if you drive up to a house and leave your cigarette lit in the ashtray while you ring the doorbell, do you think maybe you’re too old for trick or treat?
• Why do we put socks on our feet, but gloves on our hands?
• Do old-school rotary phones think of themselves as dumb phones?
• Why do we use the mnemonic “spring forward, fall back” to help remember hos Daylight Saving Time works? It could just as easily be “fall forward, spring back,” especially if you’re at a fraternity keg party.
• If you claim to be pro-choice, shouldn’t that mean you’re also pro-life? Isn’t that a choice?
• Why can’t you be combobulated?
• If a Labor Secretary is in charge of labor, then what is a Vice President in charge of?

Scrabble sidebar: for the record, oxyphenbutazone is a nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug. (or is it anti-flammatory?) It’s also a metabolite of phenylbutazone. Obviously.

But you already knew that, right? Right.

You bet your qidge we did.