It's Actually the French Word for Suitcase

Perhaps you've been in this situation before.  You bump into your neighbor on your way in or out and you get to talking and they say something like, "Yeah, money's a little tight this year.  We might have to stick around here and have a staycation.", or you're talking to someone at the office and they say, "Look at this pretty necklace Bill gave me for our monthaversary."  If you're anything like me, you feel yourself caught somewhere between the urge to cringe, and the urge to grab the nearest pair of scissors and go to work on their tongue while screaming, "Hold still dammit!  You don't deserve the ability to speak!"  Okay, maybe you're nothing like me.

They're called portmanteau words, which I'm told is itself a french example of such a word.  I'll have to take their word for it, since I don't speak French.  A portmanteau word is the bastard child formed from the illicit union of two legitimate words.  It it is not a compound word, like "doghouse" or "chalkboard", because in those cases, the original words are left intact.  Portmanteau words are the result of a messy butchering and splicing process, the sort of thing you'd expect to find in the basement of a psychopathic mad scientist.  The entrails of etymology splatter the walls.  If you break down a word like "evacuation" into its different components you can trace them back to their Latin roots.  The creators of portmanteau words couldn't care less this about this sort of thing.  Search for the roots of "jazzercise" or "ghettolicious" and you'll find nothing but nonsense.  The mad scientist sews the heart of one word to the spleen of another.  Basic anatomy is none of his concern.  It's all about cuteness and flow.  So you end up with a word like "evacucation", which I'm just going to go ahead and declare is a vacation where you end up spending most of it sitting on the toilet.  (They told you not to drink the water.)

It's not easy for these illegitimate children, born out of the wedlock of proper syntax.  They are spawned indiscriminately by any fool with a mouth.  Some of them catch on, most of them are quickly left to return to the groan-inducing dust from whence they came.  "Workaholic" is certainly an inspiring success story for words like "bromance" and "sexting" which are still struggling to make their mark.  Hell, even spellcheck apparently recognizes it as a proper word, and it doesn't even recognize itself!  Then you have words like "motel" which have enjoyed respectable society for so long, they've forgotten when they came from.

They say necessity is the mother of invention and the portmanteau word demonstrates this to a fault....then it won't shut up...then we start dropping hints that it's time for it to leave...then eventually we threaten to call the cops if it doesn't stop with the corny jokes.  But the portmanteau never takes the hint.  "Look at the time!", it says, "We've been up all night.  I could stick around and maybe we could have brunch together.  Get it!?  It's like "breakfast" and "lunch" put together.  Hee Hee!"  Oh portmanteau word, don't make me kill you.

I'll admit that some of them fill a legitimate void.  Some of them are even pretty catchy.  But for every word like "televangelist", you get fifty other words like "shart" or "procrasturbate."  Seriously?  And "guesstimate" just has to go.  It's either an estimate or a guess you stupid excuse for a word!  You're either pretty sure, or you're taking a complete shot in the dark.  You can't be both.  The bottom line on most of these words is that they're just incredibly lame.  Someone out there thinks they're being cute or clever, or maybe they're just plain lazy, and then some other idiot decides to run with it and we all have to endure words like "frenemy", hoping that they die a quick painful death.  Oh well, as long as they don't start using nouns like "antique" as verbs.  Oh...really?  Well, that's just craptabulous.           

The Power of a Word

I want to thank everyone for their comments on the last post.  I want to thank you all for your thoughtful and intelligent consideration of what I was saying, and for your own insightful input.  Mostly, I want to thank you all for not jumping ship on me.  I know how touchy a subject race can be.  I woke up today and realized that it was Martin Luther King jr. Day, and I thought, whoops.  Perhaps my timing wasn't the best, but I had no intention of coinciding with the holiday.  Quite honestly, I had forgotten all about it.  I meant no offense by what I said, and I sincerely hope none was taken.  I hope you understand; I couldn't very well argue for a word's right to remain in Huck Finn if I wasn't willing to write the word myself.  If I danced around it and only made oblique references to it, that would have undermined the point of the post, as well as compromised my own integrity.  However, I want to be perfectly clear that I absolutely do not advocate casually throwing racial epithets around.  I just don't believe a dead writer's words should be tampered with, just to make us all more comfortable with our own history.  I could only hope that no one tampers with my own words long after I'm gone, assuming anyone even remembers that I was alive.

I believe that if there's any hope of us all getting along and putting these painful chapters of the past behind us, then we all need to learn to calm down, relax, and speak openly about these things.  I think that acting like someone has violated some sort of restraining order if they get within fifty feet of the subject of race is counter-productive.  We need to put our cards on the table.  We need to embrace the awkwardness and push our way through, rather than running away.  I don't believe in sugar-coated social tranquillizers that put us all to sleep and allow us to go on living in denial.  I believe in the smoke alarm that wakes us up so that we can put out the fire before it's too late.  That alarm might be painful and disturbing to the ears, but it's far better than letting the house burn to the ground.  

People ofter say, "We'll look back on this and laugh someday."  I truly hope that day comes on the subject of race.  I hope the day will come when the lexicon of hatred will hold nothing but blank pages, and the words that sting and hurt today will finally become demystified and robbed of their power.  I hope the day will come where we'll be able to sit down and talk comfortably about the people we all once were, but are no longer. That day may be a long way off, but it'll never come until the tension in the air is diffused.  If we go on hiding everything behind painful smiles and we walk on egg-shells around each other, if we jump to conclusions and fly into anger at each other at the mere mention of a word, then we'll never be able to reveal the warmth of our true smiles and welcome each other in as part of the larger family of the human race.

Am I defending the word?  No.  I'm saying that the word gains power if you lock it away in a vault.  It becomes the "forbidden Word" with a capital "n", and it grows to mystical proportions.  It draws attention to itself in that void of silence where you censor it.  It becomes the undiagnosed cancer festering beneath the skin.  It becomes almost sacred and revered by virtue of being forbidden.  I say let it go.  Let them scream it from the rooftops until their voice is gone.  Don't give them the satisfaction.  Who cares?  It's just sad, angry men cursing the world.  They hold no real power over you.  They hold no power over any of us, beyond the power we give them.  Don't give them the power.  Let the vault stand empty and leave them with no weapons in their arsenal.  I hope we can forgive and be forgiven and all move on together.  There's a universe of incredible possibilities out there if we can set aside our petty differences between each other.

This is a Dictionary; Don't Make Me Smack You with It.

A few years ago a couple of co-workers of mine got into a conversation about gun control one night.  One of them went off on the typical conservative rant on the subject, and I pretty much kept quiet and stayed out of it.  It's not that I have particularly strong opinions about gun control.  Sometimes it's the thought process, or lack of it, that went into the formation of a person's opinions that's more of a problem than the actual opinion itself.  It's like having a guy tell you that they shouldn't have trials for rapists; they should just execute them on the spot.  It's not that you're pro-rape.  You just know that you'd be wasting your breath arguing the merits of due process with a person like that.

There's a 30 day waiting period, Comrade.

So anyway, at one point, as this guy was ranting along at a nice pace, he mentioned something about gun control being "communist."  He kept hammering away at this point.  After he had dropped the word for the fourth or fifth time, I couldn't restrain myself any longer from throwing my two cents in.  "Communism is an economic system", I told him, "It really has nothing to do with gun control at all.  You're thinking of 'totalitarianism'.  People usually confuse the two terms, because communism in practice tends to lead to totalitarianism, but it's not the same thing.  Communism is just the equal redistribution of wealth.  That's it."  Naturally these guys looked at me like I had just landed here from another planet, and eventually the whole thing somehow led to me having to have this stupid conversation with someone yet again.  I probably should have just kept my mouth shut. 

But as a writer, I get very annoyed when people abuse the language and carelessly throw words around without knowing what they mean.  It seems like it happens the most with derogatory terms, or at least terms with derogatory overtones.  It's the overtones that people really enjoy.  They just love how insulting a word sounds, and they're not going to let a little thing like meaning slow them down when they're really on a roll.  Some people even have their favorite term of reproach that they use to pass judgment on nearly everything.  My mother is a very religious person and she throws around the term "humanistic" as though she were being paid for every use.  The pastor at the church we went to when I was kid gave a sermon on Humanism once, and she's been entralled with the term ever since.  Any type of idea, theory, or practice of any kind that leaves God out of the equation is denounced as "humanistic" in her book.  The IRS is probably humanistic for not praying before they send out our 1099 forms.

 The internet is a fertile breeding ground for misused words.  "Irony" alone has a long and confused history.  At first it was used indiscriminately to describe any coincidence, cleverness, or circumlocution.  Any chain of events that fell together in a neat way was applauded for being "ironic."  This vast electronic market of words was flooded with the term.  But then the backlash set in.  These days it's the in thing to instantly attack anyone who uses the word.  Whisper the word "irony" in even the most obscure corner of the web and someone will immediately pop up and dismiss you as idiot.  Ironically, there seems to be no acceptable definition of the word that anyone can agree on.  To be fair, irony is a somewhat elusive concept and I've yet to find a dictionary that really does the word justice.  I've always thought of it as a twisted connection between cause and effect, but I'm not sure that really covers it either.

The internet even struggles with its own special terminology.  There are not enough bridges in all of the kingdom to provide shelter for everyone that gets labeled as a "troll" on a message board.  The word was useful enough to begin with, and it designated a certain specific phenomenon.  It's a person who deliberately irritates and mocks people on a forum, solely for the sake of getting a reaction.  There's no real sincerity behind anything they say.  They just want to piss people off.  Period.  That's a troll, plain and simple; nothing more, nothing less.  Yet, people call anyone they don't like or anyone who irritates them a "troll", and the word has become completely devalued as a result.  It's like "Epic Fail"; it's become a cheap insult, ready at hand, and easy to use....and virtually meaningless at this point. Someone gets mad, and the "T-word" starts flying.  Yeah!  That'll show 'em! 

I try my best to be conscientious with the words I use.  I confess that I also have a special affection for certain words; I just like the way they sound.  But I try to make sure I know what the word actually means before I use it, especially if I'm preserving my own words in writing.  There are times in the course of working on post like this that I'll have a word that I'm planning to use, and I'll be pretty sure I know what it means or I'll kind of have a vague idea.  In those cases I'll always look it up.  In fact, I've done it three times during the writing of this post, and no, I'm not telling you which words.  Some things are best kept a trade secret.  Anyhow, I have to say, I have an almost perfect track record.  The word nearly always means just what I thought it meant.  But it's always better to double check and be sure.  I'd hate to get caught with my pants down and end up looking like an idiot because I confused the difference between "affect" and "effect".  Which brings me to another story:

About nine years ago I was working as night security guard at a salt mine.  It was just a few months after the Sept. 11th attack.  One night, just around shift change, a semi truck pulled into the lot.  There were two Arab men in the truck, and they got out to ask me for directions to a nearby town.  As we stood there and I gave the men directions, the 2nd shift miners were leaving and they all stared as they passed us in the parking-lot.  Tension was running high then, of course.  A few hours later I got a call from one of the miners, and he starting going into this whole thing about how he had noticed that the semi's trailer wasn't properly sealed.   "I don't mean to sound like a pedophile.", he told me.  Well, the thought hadn't really crossed my mind until then.  I didn't have the heart to explain his mistake to him.  I can only hope that he doesn't find himself feeling paranoid around the wrong people.

Anyway, so I do my homework.  Big deal.  Still, I feel like I owe it to myself and to anyone else who has the misfortune to be listening to me, to try to know what I'm talking about if I'm going to bother opening my mouth.  At the very least, I can get the words right.  If I started tossing around any multi-syllabic gems that I've picked up in my travels with reckless abandon, then I'd risk the possibility of exposing myself as a fool and coming off looking pretentious.  And don't even get me started on that word.