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Monthly Archives: July 2025

A Serious Look at Language, with a Great Deal of Inadvertent Giggling and Smirking, etc.

The popular Scrabble-esque game Words With Friends

Permits many F-words,

But will not allow at least one.

Now, DILDO is obviously sexually connotative

But Words with Friends, as demonstrated above,

Allows its use.

I confess I blushed as I used it,

The more so since my opponent had a female name,

And I doubt if I have ever met or talked to her

In real life.

I have a real-life female friend

With whom I play WWF on a daily basis,

And sometimes our use of sexual words,

Though always strategic and never gratuitous,

Seems downright flirty.

The current President of the United States,

After having dropped bombs on faraway Iran

Without Congressional approval,

Dropped an F-Bomb while knowingly in view

Of recording devices, including video,

Because two countries were not doing

What he wanted them to do.

This may result in an increased proliferation

Of F-bombs amongst schoolchildren

For whom POTUS is, if not a role model, an excuse.

There is a book that permits me to call him

And his “Big, Beautiful Bill”

A thief

And his satchel of burglar tools.

The book is my Dictionary.

if you save up nickels in your jarred garage

to sell on a cruise–that, my friend’s, arbitrage

as long as the buyer’s sufficiently dense

as to give you per each in excess of five cents.

.

when acorns reach soil and there find safe harbor

a sapling may soon be enhancing an arbor

and if that safe arbor is somewhere in michigan

could it be an ann arbor arbor? we wish again.

.

a rhubarb’s a colorful stalk or a beef

in baseball when coaches and umps yell their grief

but both may be settled if they chance to try

addition of strawberries: sweet rhubarb pie.

.

the pluck of a syllable from its word-origin

may not be the best vessel to put your porridge in

but sure as my namesake’s a drummer named gary

it makes unchaotic the once…arb-itrary.

***

Life-historical note: I was named after a man my folks picked up hitchhiking in 1954. He had a pair of drumsticks with him and was demonstrating his drummer’s skill zanily in the back seat as he introduced himself as Gary Fromer the Drummer. Mom had a bun in the oven, me, and Mom and Dad found Mr. Fromer so personable and lively that they memorialized their encounter with him by naming me Gary. I later found out that he hung out with Lenny Bruce and also was briefly in a Stan Getz combo.

The bustard’s an exquisite fowl/With minimal reason to growl/He escapes what would be/Illegitimacy/By grace of a fortunate vowel. Winning entry from 10,000 entrants of a limerick contest judged by Isaac Asimov

sixteen pieces in a chess set but for color

and four and four and four and two and two

and sixty-four

and the answers of multiple-choice tests with perfect scores

but it is the near-identical

the not-quite-identical

that gives a field of flowers charm

that enriches speciation

that makes one coin worth a penny

and its near-twin worth a mint

ah mints

junior mints are corpuscular

andes mints are sandwiched planks

and there was a place called Luigi’s on sixteenth Street and Glendale fifty years ago

a delicatessen that sold french mints

and i would get some for my then-sweetheart

because she loved them and i loved her

.

isn’t it startling that a group of vastly different people can have identical names?

isn’t it more startling that you can view a group of vastly different people with identical names within seconds by conducting a search on that name and selecting the Images subset of the search?

or that by changing a t to a d

you change Mint to Mind?

and then ditch the d for an e

and you become Mine.

bwahahahaha!!!

(near-identical to bwajajajaja!!!)