Thursday, May 30, 2013

Random Nonsense

Sorry I haven't been posting as much lately.  I've been busy with my new job at a keyboard-manufacturing plant!  I'm working as a seqwerty guard.

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The awesome, outstanding, mind-blowing Scale Of The Universe website.  It might be, dare I say, the coolest site in the universe and it's certainly a great way to kill a half-hour.  It also helped settle a bet for me, since I correctly said that Kanye West's ego was, in fact, larger than Alpha Centauri.

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I overheard a peculiar heckle from the stands at a recent soccer game.  A player had, ahem, 'been fouled' and was now down on the turf, clutching his ankle and looking for all the world like he had just stepped into a bear trap.  Of course, after a brief visit from the trainer and a stroll to the sidelines, the injured player was up and running again with no issue within two minutes.

While the player was down, however, one fan yelled the following: "you cry like a taint!"

For the uninitiated, the "taint" is slang for the area between your rectum and your genitals, and I believe the term originated in a Conan O'Brien SNL sketch.  Calling someone a taint is a perfectly legitimate insult, and "you cry like a…" is an insult as old as the form itself.  What doesn't make sense, however, is why these two have been combined into one confusing taunt.  After all, taints don't cry (also the title of a very rare and unsuccessful early single from The Cure).

So why a taint taunt?  Perhaps it related to the fact that the player was, as noted, milking this injury to try and draw a booking or to just give himself a minute of rest during the game.  Since these kinds of dives are frowned upon, it could be argued that the player was "tainting" the sport, and thus the fan used the term in this context while also using the subjective form to associate it with the more common insult.  Wordplay.  Brilliant.

Forget what I said, this fan is clearly a wordsmith. 

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Here's another quirk of language.  If you say "oh, my mind was a million miles away" when you're daydreaming or something, you could alternatively say "my mind was 1000 miles away," or "100 miles away," or even "my mind was a mile away" and these would all mean the same thing.

Though if you said, "my mind is 1000 taints away," that would be just weird.  And gross.

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The new edition of 'Between Two Ferns,' which also just happens to be the Lonely Island's new video.  I've got to say, I don't quite remember spring break in the same way, but I'm forgetting things in my old age.  Let me ask my husband, he'll know.

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