chill out

 Watching the lions

Today was the hottest day yet this year, forecast at 94 degrees and it felt like 100+. A perfect day for the zoo, right? Well, not exactly. Extreme heat and seventeen children create a certain special brand of mayhem—not even counting the other scads of tourists. The Thursday before Memorial Day may have had something to do with it too. But besides all of that we managed to have a great time. The iPhone doesn't have a blur feature (or if it does, I'm not using it), it was just so darn hot some of my photos were muggy.



Orangutan on the move

One of the most oft-heard phrases uttered by parents (besides me for once) today was, "Chill out." Wow, it's considered an intransitive verb, c. 1980. Not only did this phrase express the frustration of the herding of our little cats, but the actual weather conditions. Luckily, there were strategically placed water misters to at least help with the latter.

twerp

In my unending search for alternate curse words (to employ mainly while behind the wheel) it recently occurred to me that twerp might be a good choice, as opposed to jerk, idiot, or worse. Twit is also a contender.

Any other suggestions?

I know I first hear it from my dad, who may also have been looking for less colorful language. Not sure I buy the Tolkien association offered by Wiktionary. That seems altogether too twerpy to believe.

fiditty

No, not Puff Daddy or P. Diddy or Puffy or whatever the hell he's calling himself these days. Fiditty was one of my dad's euphemisms for poop. Crap. Numero due. He had a lot of expressions for lots of things. I think he dreamed it up. I've never heard it anywhere else.

One of my brother's early words (learned from Pop) was lollapalooza (he pronounced it yayapayoozah), which was one of my dad's words for something unbelievable. Used in a sentence, "Munson's grand slam was some lollapalooza."

He did a fair share of name calling. I now wonder if it was a reflection of his generation, or alternative cursing. Bad drivers and errant Yankees (New York, that is) could earn the appellation "knucklehead," "dimwit," or "furshlugginer twit." Furshlugginer is of course an adjective.

He also cursed, whenever his Sicilian temper boiled over. I probably didn't learn all the really bad words from him, but I probably heard them first used to their full effect. Being a newspaperman, his most colorful cursing always read like a headline to me, "Shit, piss and corruption." Love that one. Used it myself.

Language is an amazing thing. We learn words, first spoken aloud, as someone speaks or reads to us, and then later, as we learn to read ourselves. Conversation, and not books, however, is where most colorful phrases seem to originate. Hopefully, as we read computer screens more and more, we won't lose the desire to converse, even curse at each other in creative and wonderful ways. No emoticons required.