although i’ve been off the heavy drugs for a few days now, occasional episodes of pain cause my mind to melt and leak out of my ears, and then after i take something for it, the brain mush then detours to find its way out of my mouth.

hence, the iterations of “the puffy foot” that have come into being lately:

mr. puffy foot

senor puffy foot (for that south-of-the-border flair)

herr puffy fuss (pronounced foooose, like the germans do)

for-the-love-what-is-at-the-end-of-my-leg

and, despite my busy schedule of trolling the internet, napping, doing some work, watching netflix, reading, looking pitifully hungry to remind the husband to feed me at regular intervals (he’s a rather unpredictable eater), i decided to get all technically correct (at least internet-correct, as we all know the info on this machine can seriously range) and get the following:

die geschwollene fuss (note the AWESOME german adjective for puffy which sounds an awful lot like the word ‘swollen’)

el pie hinchado (spanish)

le pied gonflé (the french, which makes my hunchbackfoot sound rather like a tasty soufle, no?)

or

de gezwollen voet (in dutch, which sounds like the german translation got a little drunk, sloppy and chatty)

of course, this is the internet, so all of these phrases could just be
translations of “this injury has made the girl go ROUND THE BEND.”

wikipedia, combining two of my favorite things — grammatical definitions + venn diagrams.

also? pretty thankful i still have friends who are willing to be seen with me.

The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.”

– attribution of quote still in question, but ain’t it lovely?

It’s “make do”, not “make due”.

If i have to “make do”, that means I will get by with whatever less than ideal materials i possess.

If i have to “make due”, I am literally making a requirement for something to be turned in to me, and this requires both an object that I am making due and a willingness to sound like Ainsley Hayes in the West Wing, as in”I need to make due these papers by Friday in order to have grades in”.

Got it?  Go forth and make do, and (for my fellow teacher friends) make due.  Do both.  Class dismissed.

who am i?

both.  i am both of these characters, usually simultaneously.

bawling vs. balling.

now.

bawling means to cry, usually with force and volume, because you are sad or watching titanic for the 16th time while pregnant eating doritos, or when something legitimately heart-wrenching occurs.  the dictionary uses the word “unrestrainedly” to describe the said event, which sounds pretty heavy.  balling (or “ballin’” as the Young People of Today like to say it) tends to refer to a myriad of mostly non-related things:

balling literally means to be rolling something into a ball, as in “he was balling his test in his hands”.

ballin’ refers to either the game of basketball, or that someone is living an affluent lifestyle/being ‘the man’, as in “we be ballin’!”(thank you urban dictionary and too much time watching mtv).

so you can see why someone saying “i was balling at this lifetime channel movie” is both wrong and really, really amusing.  just trying to make you all look smarter, people

go forth with expanded knowledge, my friends, and hopefully nothing to bawl at.

it happens to be both a curiosity of mine to know the background of idioms; it also happens to be a more-than-mild-grammar-snob annoyance when i see them repetitiously butchered in print.  what can i say, i’m an editor/teacher/nitpicky high-horser who likes language (like, LIKE-likes.  you know what i mean).  but if you were never taught, how do you even know it’s wrong?  you don’t.   knowing is half the battle, like g.i. joe says, but in this case, the other half is editing your words before you click ‘publish’ versus, say, red and blue lasers.

i’m certainly not going to nit-pick everything, because SERIOUSLY PEOPLE – i’m not that girl.  i don’t even capitalize “correctly”; obviously, i don’t get all that grumpy.

but, i notice.

so.

lesson for today:

if something catches your eye, you want to say that it

piques your interest.

not PEEK.

not PEAK.

pique.

the word pique comes from the french language (as does a large, and i mean LARGE amount of our english vocabulary). the french word is piquer, which literally means ‘to prick’.

many idioms can be arrived at (or checked) by just looking at it with some common sense, but certainly not all.  something peeking your interest makes no sense.  you could reasonably sort out “peaking your interest”, as it connotes a rise in interest.  however, you would say that you peak someones interest, rather than peak-ing, which isn’t really a word.

so there you are, your idiom for the weak.

see what i did there?   if i were an 80′s band, i’d be grammarama, for sure.

post script:

since we’re on this pique/peek/peak business, when you say you want to look at something, you use “peek”.  how to remember that?  peak = mountain.  if you aren’t talking about something big, or mountain-like, best bet is you need “peek”.  homonyms will get you every time.

BORING FRIENDS

We know only four boring people.  The rest of our friends we
find very interesting.  However, most of the friends we find
interesting find us boring: the most interesting find us the
most boring.  The few who are somewhere in the middle,
with whom there is reciprocal interest, we distrust: at any
moment, we feel, they may become too interesting for us, or
we too interesting for them.

– from Samuel Johnson is Indignant, by Lydia Davis

hearts.

torpor

1 a: a state of mental and motor inactivity with partial or total insensibility.

* * * *

how apt.  i see that these next few days are going to be excruciating.

because one of those word-phrases could be used with regularity in my life as precisely describing a scenario in which i figuratively find myself.

and the other one, not at all.

so, both words (two-word hyphenates?) are out of the running for daily usage. bon voyage.