"Mensa Invitational"

Not sure the Washington Post is truly responsible but some of these are very clever: Here are the winners of the Washington Post's annual Mensa Invitational, which once again asked readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply a new definition.

Cashtration: (n.) The act of buying a house, which renders the subject financially impotent for an indefinite period of time.
Intaxication: Euphoria at getting a tax refund, which lasts until you realize it was your money to start with.
Reintarnation: Coming back to life as a hillbilly.
Bozone: ( n.) The substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas from penetrating. The bozone layer, unfortunately, shows little sign of breaking down in the near future.
Giraffiti: Vandalism spray-painted very, very high.
Sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the Person who doesn't get it.
Inoculatte: To take coffee intravenously when you are running late.
Osteopornosis: A degenerate disease. (This one got extra credit.)
Karmageddon: It's like, when everybody is sending off all these really bad vibes, right? And then, like, the Earth explodes and it's like, a serious bummer.
Decafalon: (n.) The gruelling event of getting through the day consuming only things that are good for you.
Glibido: All talk and no action.
Dopeler Effect: The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.
Arachnoleptic Fit: (n.) The frantic dance performed just after you've accidentally walked through a spider web.
Beelzebug: (n.) Satan in the form of a mosquito, that gets into your bedroom at three in the morning and cannot be cast out.
Caterpallor: ( n.) The color you turn after finding half a worm in the fruit you're eating.


The Post also published the winning submissions to its yearly contest, in which readers are asked to supply alternate meanings for common words. And the winners are:


Coffee, n. The person upon whom one coughs.
Flabbergasted, adj. Appalled by discovering how much weight one has gained.
Abdicate, v. To give up all hope of ever having a flat stomach.
Esplanade, v. To attempt an explanation while drunk.
Willy-nilly, adj. Impotent.
Negligent, adj. Absentmindedly answering the door when wearing only a nightgown.
Lymph, v. To walk with a lisp.
Gargoyle, n. Olive-flavored mouthwash.
Flatulence, n. Emergency vehicle that picks up someone who has been run over by a steamroller.
Balderdash, n. A rapidly receding hairline.
Testicle, n. A humorous question on an exam.
Rectitude, n. The formal, dignified bearing adopted by proctologists.
Pokemon, n. A Rastafarian proctologist.
Oyster, n. A person who sprinkles his conversation with yiddishisms
Frisbeetarianism, n. The belief that, after death, the soul flies up onto the roof and gets stuck there.
Circumvent, n . An opening in the front of boxer shorts worn by Jewish men.

Being Russell Baker

By the time in 1978 that I moved to New York to attend NYU -- not for scholastic purposes but because it was the most legitimate excuse I could muster for moving to Gotham -- I was not just a regular reader of Russell Baker, the NYTimes columnist, I wanted to be Russell Baker.

My impression was of someone who had so much fun filling his 800-word space three times a week that he did so while jumping up and down in his chair.

He quickly disabused me of that notion when I interviewed him for a school newspaper. He had just won the first of his two Pulitzer prizes for commentary. When I asked him if writing were ever fun for him, he said, flatly, "No. My guess is that anyone for whom writing is fun is not a professional." He went on to say that his job was "like a surgeon who takes out so many gall bladders a week. It's a nice day and you want to sit in the park, but there's this space that you have to fill." He concluded by noting that at 54 he had already counted the number of columns he would have to write before retiring.

So maybe I wasn't destined to be Russell Baker after all. I still don't know if he was being genuinely cynical or theatrically so. But I do know that in a brief journalism career immediately following graduation from NYU, I got a taste of what he was talking about. "I have met the enemy and he is me" rang through my head on more than one occasion after not having made one keystroke in an expected 2500-word piece. I know I have a lot of company. I understood then why so many writers are alcoholics.

Having said all that, I retain a keen appreciation -- and memory -- for much of Russell Baker's work. One column I particularly liked was one called "Why Being Serious is Hard." You can find it below. And if you've never heard of Russell Baker, go ahead and Google him to read more.

Why Being Serious is Hard
by Russell Baker

Here is a letter of friendly advice. "Be serious," it says. What it means, of course, is, "Be solemn." The distinction between being serious and being solemn seems to be vanishing among Americans, just as surely as the distinction between "now" and "presently" and the distinction between liberty and making a mess.

Being solemn is easy. Being serious is hard. You probably have to be born serious, or at least go through a very interesting childhood. Children almost always begin by being serious, which is what makes them so entertaining when compared to adults as a class.

Adults, on the whole, are solemn. The transition from seriousness to solemnity occurs in adolescence, a period in which Nature, for reasons of her own, plunges people into foolish frivolity. During this period the organism struggles to regain dignity by recovering childhood's genius for seriousness. It is usually a hopeless cause.

As a result, you have to settle for solemnity. Being solemn has almost nothing to do with being serious, but on the other hand, you can't go on being adolescent forever, unless you are in the performing arts, and anyhow most people can't tell the difference. In fact, though Americans talk a great deal about the virtue of being serious, they generally prefer people who are solemn over people who are serious.

In politics, the rare candidate who is serious, like Adlai Stevenson, is easily overwhelmed by one who is solemn, like General Eisenhower. This is probably because it is hard for most people to recognize seriousness, which is rare, especially in politics, but comfortable to endorse solemnity, which is as commonplace as jogging.

Jogging is solemn. Poker is serious. Once you grasp that distinction, you are on your way to enlightenment. To promote the cause, I submit the following list from which the vital distinction should emerge more clearly.

(1) Shakespeare is serious. David Suskind is solemn.
(2) Chicago is serious. California is solemn.
(3) Blow-dry hair stylings on anchor men for local television shows are solemn. Henry James is serious.
(4) Falling in love, getting married, having children, getting divorced and fighting over who gets the car and the Wedgewood are all serious. The new sexual freedom is solemn.
(5) Playboy is solemn. The New Yorker is serious.
(6) S.J. Perelman is serious. Norman Mailer is solemn.
(7) The Roman Empire was solemn. Periclean Athens was serious.
(8) Arguing about "structured programs" of anything is solemn. So are talking about "utilization," attending conferences on the future of anything, and group bathing when undertaken for the purpose of getting to know yourself better, or at the prescription of a swami. Taking a long walk by yourself during which you devise a foolproof scheme for robbing Cartiers is serious.
(9) Washington is solemn. New York is serious. So is Las Vegas, but Miami Beach is solemn.
(10) Humphrey Bogart movies about private eyes and Randolph Scott movies about gunslingers are serious. Modern movies that are sophisticated jokes about Humphrey Bogart movies and Randolph Scott movies are solemn.

Making lists, of course, is solemn, but this is permissible in newspaper columns, because newspaper columns are solemn. They strive, after all, to reach the mass audience, and the mass audience is solemn, which accounts for the absence of seriousness in television, paperback books found in airport bookracks, the public school systems of America, wholesale furniture outlets, shopping centers and American-made automobiles.

I make no apology for being solemn rather than serious. Nor should anyone else. It is the national attitude. It is perfectly understandable. It is hard to be Periclean Athens. It is hard to be Shakespeare. It is hard to be S.J. Perelman. It is hard to be serious.

And yet, one cannot go on toward eternity without some flimsy attempt at dignity. Adolescence will not do. One must at least make the effort to resume childhood's lost seriousness, and so, with the best of intentions, one tries his best, only to end up being vastly, uninterestingly solemn.

Writing sentences that use "One" as a pronoun is solemn. Making pronouncements on American society is solemn. Turning yourself off when pronouncements threaten to gush is not exactly serious, although it shows a shred of wisdom.


New York Times Magazine [April 30, 1978, p. 17]