flash fiction, satire, horoscopes, & more
As anybody with a classical education knows, decimate does not mean to crush, annihilate, destroy, wipe out, or knock your opponent’s dick in the dirt.
In Latin, from whence it sprang, Skippy, it means “to kill one in every ten of a group as a punishment for the entire group.”
In the encyclical Deus Own Noctis (God Owns the Night), Pope Francis warned that Catholics “can not seek refuge in sleep” in order to enjoy illicit sexual activities.
“God sees you when you’re sleeping,” declared the 86-year-old pope. “Any activity forbidden to waking Catholics is forbidden to sleeping persons, too.”
“That’s the difference between god and me,” Barney tried.
She didn’t react.
“Now if I were Roy Rogers, I’d sure enough be single.”
Again, she didn’t laugh. He feared he had lost her.
On his way to the bedroom, he said to her in his head, “Honey, where’s the gun?”
Wordplay exploiting different meanings of a word or differences between two words that sound alike but have different meanings.
“Owls are a real hoot.”
Often qualified by adding “no pun intended” or “pun intended.”
Don’t. If you didn’t intend a pun, choose another word. If you did, don’t advertise it.
Her $75,000,000 lawsuit hinges on a novel interpretation of the 14th Amendment, which, her lawyers claim, “confers protection” on pink-haired lesbians, 300-pound fatties, and all trannies.
Victoria’s Secret “caved into the patriarchy,” Lizzo declared.
“What? By featuring models that people actually want to look at?” said a Victoria’s Secret spokesperson.
It’s called Hackney Diamonds, and most critics are doing #3 in their pants, saying it’s the Stones best work in forty years.
“This band has never sounded more alive,” crowed The Guardian.
Others point out, however, that “even corpses are capable of twitching and emmitting sounds after they have died.”
BLM activist Jaleel X. Johnson-kendi, claims that gravity is a “white, heteronormative, non-cis-gender-affirming construct that disproportionally affects black people, especially young black men who don’t wear belts, “another symbol of the white man’s oppression.”
Gravity now joins math, lawns, classical music, saddle shoes, and being on time as “racist constructs.”
Joran van der Sloot assured Natalee Holloway’s parents that their daughter, legally dead since 2012, is still, in fact, dead today. The assurance was part of a plea deal in which van der Sloot admitted to extorting $25,000 from Holloway’s mother for information about her daughter that he never delivered.
Penultimate, as civilized people learn in school, means “the next to last.”
Penultimate does not mean nor should it be allowed to mean “the most ultimate” or “the most awesome.”
The misuse of penultimate leads to atrocities like this headline from Science Direct, “Female genital mutilation: the penultimate gender abuse.”
Dereck Lucas, 33, of near-by Fallowfield says he found the needle while “on a hay ride.” Lucas’ fiance, Myrna Stubblefield, was not thrilled with this discovery.
“He actually believes there’s a needle in every haystack. I’ll never convince him otherwise now.”
Lucas, meanwhile, peeled off his magnetized gloves and snickered.