Sunday, November 23, 2003 - Maggregate is the pile of subscription cards that fall out of a magazine.Icision is the delicate operation of separating one entire flavor from a serving of Neapolitan ice cream.Jukejitters is the fear that everyone thinks you picked the awful tune playing on the jukebox when it was actually the person before you.Kawashock is experienced when pulling into the last remaining parking spot only to discover a motorcycle is parked there.Lactomangulation is the act of manhandling the “open here” spout on a milk carton so badly that one has to resort to using the other side.Netnute is a unit of time indicating work time lost due to reading Internet jokes, here or elsewhere.
Monday, November 24, 2003 - “I don’t know why I did it, I don’t know why I enjoyed it, and I don’t know why I’ll do it again!” British Prime Minister Tony Blair greeted Homer Simpson and his family in last night’s episode, The Regina Monologues, having recorded seven lines of dialogue for the show last April. The episode also featured the voice of Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling and actor Sir Ian McKellan. Former U.S. presidents Bill Clinton, George Bush Sr. and Jimmy Carter have lent their voices to the series, but Mr. Blair is the first British leader to appear in Fox television’s long-running show. Online BBC polls show Homer Simpson leading Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. for the title of greatest American.

Tuesday, November 25, 2003 - An accountant is someone who knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing.A mathematician is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat which isn’t there.A lawyer is a person who writes a 10,000 word document and calls it a “brief”.If you understand it and can prove it, then send it to a journal of mathematics. If you understand it, but can’t prove it, then send it to a physics journal. If you can’t understand it, but can prove it, then send it to an economics journal. If you can neither understand it nor prove it, then send it to a psychology journal.Keep in mind, “The vain and the foolish alter the facts to fit their views instead of altering their views to fit the facts.”

Wednesday, November 26, 2003 - “Considering all that has happened to them, the cousins were nonplussed.” For my first three decades, I labored under the delusion that nonplussed meant calm or matter-of-fact. I blame onomatopoeia. The word sounded calm. Then I found out, as always in a public conversation, never in the privacy of my study, that nonplussed meant “To bewilder, to put at a loss as to what to think, say, or do.” I was nonplussed. Rationalizing, I suppose someone frozen in the headlights of bewilderment could be mistaken as being calm. Blame Latin. Non is not. Plus is more. The cousins were not more? George Carlin begs the question, “Can you be plussed?” If angry, you can be pissed, but never nonpissed.

Thursday, November 27, 2003 - The Fool rebuked. “It is unfortunate that you have fallen into common — nay, shall we say — VULGAR use of the term “beg the question”. Fowler explains it best as the “fallacy of founding a conclusion on a basis that as much needs to be proved as the conclusion itself.” This usage of the term falls into the same category as using “the lion’s share” when one means “preponderance” or “greatest part.” In the fable, the lion’s share was the entire kill, so the lion’s share actually means 100%.” I see. Such a staunch position begs the question if homonyms are fair game, words pronounced the same and spelled the same but with different meanings, why not have homonymic phrases?

Friday, November 28, 2003 - The editor of The Wordplay Website calls them proprietary eponyms and says, “Clearly these words enter our language through the success of companies’ advertising campaigns — Kleenex, Xerox, Chapstick — but it is not necessarily a positive thing for a tradename to reach this status, for once the trademark becomes a well-used uncapitalized generic term, the company is in danger of losing exclusive rights to its usage, and thus its competitors may legally take advantage of the word that the original company had spent millions of dollars to promote. Recently Google’s lawyers have been fighting the decision of one dictionary to include ‘to google’ meaning ‘to search online’.”
Saturday, November 29, 2003 - Double Feature Day. Bad Santa depicts the way I want to think of Billy Bob Thornton in real life. I loved this movie. It is a foul-mouthed, ill-mannered comedy that somehow manages to end up sweet but not sugary. I pity the family with tots in tow that ignore the R rating, though I’d pay good money to witness it! And then, Runaway Jury, another in a long line of “Why does the studio bother paying John Grisham to use his novel when they re-write the whole damn thing anyway?” films. I held out for quite a while, thinking this would be a rental, but my local 30-plex kept running the movie, week after week, and now I see why. Gene Hackman, John Cusack, Dustin Hoffman, Rachel Weisz, all entertain.