The Friday Fillip

Somewhere in between “Cest la vie”, “Whattya gonna do?” and “Shit happens” falls my new zen koan “Snakes on a Plane”.

WIFE: “Honey you stepped in dog poop again. ”
ME: “Snakes on a Plane…”
DOCTOR: “Your cholesterol is 290. Perhaps you want to mix in a walk once in a while.”
ME: “Snakes on a Plane…”
WIFE: “Honey while you were on your cholesterol walk you stepped in dog poop again.”

You get the picture.

Josh Friedman’s blog “I find your lack of faith disturbing”

I’ll never see the flick, but I might use the line if milk ever spills in my life. Le mot juste is something I enjoy — as, I imagine, do most Slawyers. “Juste-ice” depends on context, which most of the time is pretty mainstream for me, but every now and then I stray into somewhere a bit more unusual and want to know a word or two in the local lingua franca. If you ever find yourself out of the office, shall we say, The Urban Dictionary might help.

As what isn’t nowadays, it’s a participatory venture, with definitions flying in from all parts. But the parts are noted and the definitions are voted on, so you can more or less judge what kicks ass and what’s wack. There’s also a kind of thesaurus section at the top of each definition that lets you run through similar terms — though I find it wanders a lot, which may not be a bad thing. And if you go looking in one of the alphabet sections, you’d be best off going straight to any word you happen to know via the text entry box, because each letter seems to spawn a dozen pages of acronyms that can weary.

If the site is to be believed, 1022 new definitions were added today, though most of what I see is fairly lame and most of it is… sexual or scatalogical. But should you wish to stay current, use this URL — http://www.urbandictionary.com/yesterday.php — to see the latest list, because it’ll get updated each day, apparently.

A bit more conservative is The Dictionary of English Slang and Colloquialisms in the UK. And for the truly adventurous among you, who wish to wander yet further afield, there is “The Alternative Dictionaries: Slang, profanities, insults and vulgarisms from all the world“, where you can find the common way to say it from Acadian to Zulu.