flash fiction, satire, horoscopes, & more
The preferred term for people who do not have children. Being child-free means never having to deal with stinking diapers, temper tantrums, smart-ass teenagers, or paying for college.
It means sleeping in on weekends, having uninterrupted conversations, and sex without making an appointment. Let’s spark a blunt to child-free living!
The two toes on a camel’s foot serve more than a decorative function. They are able to spread widely, when the occasion demands, in order to distribute the animal’s weight over as large a surface area as possible. This capability helps to prevent the camel from sinking into soft ground.
Liberals can feel guilty without actually sinning. They yearn to change the national anthem to “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” They’ll take your money and give it to LGBTQ1A++, BLM, and other members of the alphabet mafia. Liberal women have dainty moustaches. Liberal men, pony tails and male pattern baldness.
Postmodern philosophy is the mycelium from which the toxic fungi of skepticism, sarcasm, deconstructionism, ironic politeness, and self-aware apologies emerge.
These are nourished by a distrust of grand narratives and a single-minded pursuit of power in human interactions.
Postmodernism has also been described as modernism with the cheerfulness taken out.
Thomas Hobson (1544–1631) owned a livery stable in Cambridge, England. Anyone seeking to rent a horse there had two choices: the horse nearest the stable door or no horse at all.
A Hobson’s choice, therefore, is not really a choice between two unpleasant alternatives. That’s called a Morton’s fork, Skippy.
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.”
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.
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.”
Often confused with ironic by semi-literates. If you’re thinking about an old friend and you bump into that person somewhere, that’s not ironic, Skippy. It’s coincidental. If he says, “I’m going to Boston this weekend,” and you are, too, that’s still not ironic. Capisci? Click here for ironic’s true meaning.
A conservative is afraid that somebody, somewhere is having a good time without his approval. Conservatives don’t like anything to happen that hasn’t happened before. They want to take your money and give it to people richer than you are so they can buy expensive bottled water for their dogs.