Some choice words

Why hello there, homemen and homewomen. I don't know where that came from, but I like it quite a bit. I guess homeboys should grow up eventually, right? I have to remember to use that more often. "I was talking to my homeman Greg last night..." It will likely confuse the hell out of people though. "Oh, is he your realtor or something?" No, you silly hypothetical person not understanding my hypothetical conversation with you. I don't think we should hypothetically hang out anymore.

It should come as no surprise to any of you who have visited UOPTA more than once that I enjoy the world of words. They're simultaneously powerful and fun to play with, much like a bear cub. (I could've gone many, many ways with the end of that sentence, but you should trust me that "bear cub" was a much better choice than other things that I was tempted to write.) Today I shall write more about the "playing with them" side of things, as I am wont to do.

In college, I took four different creative writing courses, and I loved them all. I've always had an easy time with form, and meter's always made my heart grow warm. So in the beginning of my second class, I started challenging myself to do more. For example, I wrote a sonnet about waltzing and made the rhyme scheme ABC ABC ABC ABC DD as a way to mimic the 1-2-3 beat of a waltz. I know I just lost half of my audience, but if you follow me at all, you hopefully see what I'm talking about. This ended up backfiring just a little, because by the end of the quarter, people were guessing what I "really meant" in some poems in which I'd actually been straightforward. That's ok, because the exercise was almost always just for my own personal gratification.

As my mother reminded me recently, wordplay has been a big part of my life since I was a kid. In 7th grade, I had an English class with one Mrs. Greenberger. (The next year, incidentally, I had Mrs. Bluestein. I've confident that if I had stayed there for 9th grade, they would've hired someone named Mrs. Yellowbaum to keep the color-and-Jewish-suffix streak alive.) She would provide us with a list of vocabulary words each week, and we would have to do the same thing each time. First we'd define each one, and then we'd have to make up a story that included at least five of them in there. I loved this, and I wish someone still gave me a task like that every week. I don't have any of those stories left, and but my parents and Mrs. Greenberger herself thought they were great. I almost felt like a professional athlete or actor might in that I was doing something that I loved and other people were getting joy from it. Ya know, minus the millions of dollars of course.

In high school, crazy lady Mrs. Dunlop gave us vocabulary lists as well. She just wanted us to define them and then write one sentence for each. This didn't afford me too much room to maneuver creativity-wise, but I did what I could to still have some fun with it. I remember some of the words from that year because I think of my exact sentences every single time they come up in conversation. Here they are:

Ephemeral: The ephemeral mayfly's life expectancy is only 24 hours.

Ubiquitous: In the movies, Superman is portrayed as ubiquitous whenever danger occurs.

Formidable: Ron rolled up his sleeve to show off his formidable bicep.

Cumin: My health-conscious aunt ate the whole family's cumin.

I know none of those are earth-shatteringly original or anything, but those full sentences have accompanied those words in my head for the past 16 years. That's a long time to have the same words floating around, don't you agree?

The next year, I forced my wordplay upon my friend Jon. Back then, he was still in his shell a little and I was the outgoing one of the two of us. An MFA in Acting later, I think the roles have switched a bit. In any case, he had a history assignment in which he had to write about Abraham Lincoln's decision-making in the time of the Civil War. I was over at his place, and I suggested that we have some fun with it. He was against the idea at first, but when I offered to implement my ideas (i.e. do his work for him), he eventually acquiesced.

My idea was to find two random words and somehow incorporate them into the two-page essay. I kept flipping through the dictionary and pointing blindly, but the first few attempts landed me on very common words which weren't any fun. Then I hit "aquifer," a word neither of us had heard of or really have since. Our friends at Merriam Webster tell us that it means, "a water-bearing stratum of permeable rock, sand, or gravel." Naturally, I constructed a contrived sentence about Lincoln using his generals like disseminate his instructions, much like an aquifer delivers water. Did it make sense? Not really, no, but he let me keep it in there.

I then opened Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night," which I have since come to know and love through the years. After a few attempts, I landed on the lovely "cross-gartered," which is how Malvolio dressed up for Olivia because the fake love note told him to. In any case, there was no way to easily associate someone wearing garters with our buddy Abe, so I changed its definition to one meaning "confused." I said something about conflicting reports leaving Lincoln feeling cross-gartered and unsure of how to proceed. Again, Jon let me leave it in there. I'm not positive, but I seem to recall a red circle around that and a "Word choice?" comment in the margins. I didn't care though; I had fun with it and it wasn't my grade being affected.

So there you go, homepeople. My wordnerdiness has been around for a while, and all signs point to it remaining with me indefinitely. Have a good day, and I shall be back here again tomorrow. Feel free to write to ptklein@gmail.com with anything about anything in the meantime. Shaloha, friends.

We're number fun!

It comes as no surprise to many of you that I enjoy wordplay. Puns (especially bad ones), crossword puzzles, and the intricacies of language are fun things to me, regardless of how dorky that may seem. It's a big reason I was an English major in college, and an even bigger reason why I took so many creative writing courses. I truly enjoyed finding the exact right words to convey my thoughts while also fitting perfectly into rhyme schemes and meters. I'm not very spatial, so these were my kinds of puzzles.

At some point in my wordplay history, I brought numbers into the fold. I'm not sure when it started, but I began using a term that will soon be sweeping the nation (yes, like "baby fish mouth"): 5ever. Before I go any further, please don't confuse this with the "using numbers as letters" phenomenon I wrote about in a previous post. "5ever" is not pronounced "sever" or even "fever," but rather "five-ever." Here's an example: "My parents and Greg's parents were friends before we were born, so I've known him for, like, 5ever." Ya dig? "When the hell are we going to get on Splash Mountain? We've been in this line for, like, 5ever!" I've found that the "like" is almost a necessity when spoken, because it clues the listener in to the fact that something cool and different is about to happen. At least in my mind.

Once 5ever became more natural amongst my friends, there were rumblings of futher adjustments to the word. For example, if 5ever wasn't conveying the "more than 4ever" feel enough, some wanted to jump to 6ever. I wholeheartedly disagree, and tried my best to shoot that down as vehemently as possible. Also, my friend Kareem tried using 3ever, which didn't make any sense to me. I said, "I understand that that's less than 4ever, but is it ten years or two weeks?" His response: "It depends." Nope, doesn't work for me. "I've only known this guy for, like, 3ever" just makes no sense to me. I hope you agree, gentle readers.

But it doesn't stop there. Will Paris Hilton do something stupid and slutty in 07? I'd say that's a 5gone conclusion. One-liners weren't just Henny Youngman's forté, hell, they were his 5té.

Before we get carried away, I want to go on record and say that this technique shouldn't be used for everything. Part of what makes it effective is its infrequency in speech, so let's not go crazy. I don't want to hear people saying something is "2derful," "3bular," or "11-der." I think those could work, but only in very specific situations. If you see a heavy-set ballerina, I think it's ok to say she's wearing a "three-three." Otherwise, maybe we should stick to 5ever.

I remember years ago seeing a preview for a movie (Barbershop maybe) in which one character referred to his friend's receding hairline by saying, "You don't have a forehead, you've got a five-head." So the movement's out there, I'm just trying to focus it on some key words and get it in some everyday use. I'd love to hear other suggested uses, so post away. But be careful with this new tool, folks. With great power comes great responsibility, or something like that.