Most people know that I pretty much laugh at anything. I'm not a loud laugher; more of a quiet, chuckler or smiler. But I do find things funny. For this post, I have to narrow all of the words or phrases that I find funny down to just two. Since I have so many that I find hilarious, paring them down to just two required some thought. Those of you reading may not find these to be funny, but it's my assignment, my choice.
As an officer with the Spelling and Grammar Police force, I try to stay on top of poor English, spelling, etc. Oddly, I find twisting around words, mispronouncing them on purpose, or just making up my own words to be downright funny. Here are a couple of examples:
Back in 10th grade in high school, I had the pleasure of sitting in front of Terri Anderson in our Typing 1 class. We used standard manual typewriters in the class, and in some ways they weren't exactly in the best condition. (Probably left over from the '60s.) Terri referred to our typewriters as being "borken," an obvious twist on the word "broken." To this day, I cannot hear or say the word "borken" without at least a smile. But I try not to overuse it because overuse leads to funny stuff not being funny anymore.
My friend Bill Hackett and I hit it off quickly when we met at a church youth group work camp in 1976. Both of us are intelligent guys with a decent (and clean) sense of humor and a lot in common. We've made up lots of slang terms that are unique to us. These days, we only use a few words of our slanguage. The most popular word of ours is "automo." It's about 2/3 of the word "automobile," which makes sense because its origin lies with that word. Bill used to have old issues of Popular Mechanics from the '30s and '40s that we would read, and we noticed that they tended to refer to cars rather formally as "automobiles" instead of "cars." We came to the conclusion that old cars must be "automobiles." So it stood to reason that old trucks must be "automotrucks." Old buses were "automobuses." And so on. But we took it even further away from sane, and decided that anything old would be "automo-something." An old stove was an "automostove." An old house? An "automohouse." You name it, we could automo-tize it. What did all of those things have in common? The prefix "automo." To us wordsmiths, it made perfect sense for this prefix to stand alone as its own adjective to define anything that was old. Forty years later, we still refer to a lot of old things as being "automo." The beauty of our linguistic creation is that few other people have any idea what the word means, so if we use it around others, the blank or confused looks are priceless. Even better is that Diana knows and understands this word and has used it on a few occasions. She doesn't use it often, but it's pretty funny when she does. It always catches me off guard.
Tomorrow we'll take a look at my commute to work—or wherever it is I go each day. Stay tuned...we'll get there.
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