News of the Right

My students think that by randomly substituting words from the thesaurus into their papers, they will sound more brilliant than they actually are. Not to say they’re “dumb”, they’re not; they just… don’t have a lot of exposure to the nuances of the English language. However, the quite brilliant people at The Onion stepped up to the plate today to show the semantically unwise the right way to use the thesaurus, to hilarious effect:

87 Killed In Violent Kerfuffle
March 11, 2008 | Issue 44•11

ISLAMABAD—Eighty-seven people were killed and 114 wounded at an open-air market in Islamabad yesterday in one of the worst ruckuses to hit the Pakistani capital in years. Witnesses said that the bloody to-do occurred shortly before noontime prayers, and that dozens were instantly killed by the doozy of a shockwave. Many more were reportedly trampled to death in the rush to escape the foofaraw. “It was as though some invisible hand had come through to wipe out all that was good and human,” onlooker Taufiq Jinnah said. “There was so much death and carnage—how could God let such a brouhaha happen?” The Pakistani government, which promised a major counter-hubbub against those responsible, would not rule out a small-scale nuclear donnybrook.

Is there any word inn the English language funnier than “kerfuffle”? I don’t think so!

OK, maybe “donnybrook”.

My brother sent me this email today about my nephew:

Hee hee hee hee.

I was rolling in the car tonight on the way back to Dominic’s house. He’s been having the Bible read to him at night and I asked him how it was going.

“Good.”

“Did you get to the flood story yet?”

“The one with Noah’s ark, yeah.”

“Did you like it?”

“Yeah.”

I asked him some questions about the two birds and all that and then said:

“Did you know that there’s another story just like that about a flood?”

“Really?”

“Yeah, except in this other one Noah is called Utnapishtim.”

“Why’s he called Utnapishtim?!?!?!?!?!?”

He pronounced it properly and his enunciation was so perfect that I started laughing my ass off. It was cute as hell. I explained why his name was different, yeah. He wasn’t proud of himself for having said it right. He just kept saying it over trying to get me to laugh again.

I asked him, “Do you remember which animals Noah took?”

“All of them. Except the unicorns were goofing around.”

*pause*…”Is that why we don’t have unicorns anymore?”

“Yeah.”

God, I love that kid!