Vocabulary, Schmocabulary

I HAVE not taken the time to count if it is as little as I have to some folk posited, but I imagine that "120" is nevertheless a liberal amount in respect to my wretched roommate's almost total vocabulary. Of course, this does not include her alarmingly loud non-verbal expressions, even if some might argue that they indeed should be counted as such.

She is never at a loss to quickly identify anything as “thingy,” nor will she not hesitate to employ “thingy” as a noun, verb or accident. Even things she sees daily and should not fail to know how to properly identify, are granted her gutteral recourse to “cute”: the teevee, a dropped shoe, a clove of garlic, one of the few forks she has not thrown away during a daily “cleaning attack” (more on THAT social disease in a future post), her remaining Cat. The list of things she calls “thingy” is as long as her memory is short.

Another atrocious aspect – one worse than even the above attempted alliteration – is her odious reflection of any supposed dust-up, as a “hairball.” From the U.S.’ involvement in Iraq, to the slightest allusion of misapprehension between two closely packed straphangers in that infrequent albeit inevitable moment when one or the other jockeys for position just as the train jerks out of the station, it is no less and no more than a “hairball.”

When her butt erupts, so does her ass: “That’s what I think of that!” she cleverly opines. And just in case all two of us fail to appreciate her wit, she performs this clever line several times a day, every day. Such sagacity is often prompted by a remark shouted by one of the screaming heads on the news channels she perpetually patronises (such as Fox or MSNBC). Sometimes she even exhibits her digital dexterity by forming her fingers into a fleshy “gun”! But we are always granted her gleeful explosion of laughter immediately afterward, an expression which is best described by that Cleesian phrase, ”Like a seal being machine-gunned.”