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Honolulu Lite Charles Memminger |
Dude, here are the words
that dog us to deathHey, dog, Michigan's Lake Superior State University has come out with its annual list of annoying words, and the sad thing, dog, is that dog wasn't one of them.
Hearing someone refer to someone else as "dog" is more irritating than the sound of fingernails scratching down the side of Arianna Huffington.
The worst perpetrator of "dog" abuse is "American Idol" judge Randy Jackson, the rotund Idi Amin look-alike who thinks he's the coolest dog on the planet. Randy, dog, you ARE a planet.
Jackson is obviously a smart, well-educated guy who is simply trying to talk hip. No one should use the term "dog" in common conversation unless they are referring to an animal with four legs or have taken a life.
The Michigan university team came up with some currently hot words that deserve to be impaled on stakes, their letters ripped apart by rabid wolverines. They include "metrosexual," which I heard used about a hundred times without knowing what it meant.
"It sounds like someone who only has sex downtown," said one of the guys who nominated it for inclusion on the language irritant list. I thought a metrosexual was a guy who had sex with everyone downtown. It actually refers to elaborately groomed heterosexual men with an interest in fashion and shopping. In other words, guys who want to have sex with everyone downtown.
The opposite of "metrosexual," I suppose, is "ruralsexual," which refers to homosexual men who dress in overalls and pick lice out of their unkempt beards with dirty fingernails.
THE WORDS and phrases were chosen by Lake Superior State because they are "trendy, trite, euphemistic or just plain inaccurate," according to a wire story. To which, I might add, "stupid, hackneyed and just plain vomitory."
Typical is the word "punk'd," which is supposed to mean "tricked" or "suckered." There's an MTV show by the same name, in which famous people are "punk'd" in elaborate "Candid Camera" kinds of setups. The thing is, if you traced the short genealogy of "punk'd" to its historic origins, you'd find yourself in prison where a "punk" is the lowest inmate in the batting order. When used as a verb, "punk'd" refers to a sexual act committed by at least one nonconsenting adult.
The university team also dumped on the Internet chatroom shorthand "LOL," which refers to "laughing out loud." Computer chatterers want you to think they use LOL because it's cool, but the real reason is because they can't spell "laughing out loud."
A couple of words and phrases that didn't make the black list, and cause me to do whatever the opposite of LOL is, include "paradigm" and "homicide bomber."
Paradigm, which simply means "example," is usually used by New Age spiritualists and other flim-flam artists to sound profound. Whenever you hear the word "paradigm," guard your wallet.
I hate "homicide bomber" mainly because it's inaccurate. FOX-TV anchors use it instead of "suicide bomber" because they think "suicide" bomber glorifies the assassin. Baloney. Every bomber is a homicide bomber. "Suicide" tells you what kind of a homicide bomber it is. My question, dog, is, Where's a good "metrosexual bomber" when you need one?
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Charles Memminger, winner of National Society of Newspaper Columnists awards, appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. E-mail cmemminger@starbulletin.com