I don't think that word means what you think it means
By Burton W. Cole
That wise old philosopher Mark Twain once said, "The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between the lightning and the lightning bug."
Exactly. One, kids put into jars during the summer to keep their rooms all aglow at night until their mother finds the smelly container under the bed six weeks later. The other, Benjamin Franklin tried to put into a jar with a key and a kite.
Neither attempt worked quite as well as when Thomas Edison packed the glow inside an upside-down glass jar and called the thing a light bulb, thereby inventing nighttime baseball games.
The point is, all these things with similar names are vastly different, so it is important to use the right words.
But in these days of rocketing technology, it's hard to keep up with all the new words needed just to keep pace. Fortunately, my friend Nancy, a teacher who knows a thing or two about words, recently e-mailed me a vocabulary list of new, keeping-up-with-the-times words.
I'm sure there will be a quiz, so pay attention:
Arbitrator: A cook who leaves Arby's to work at McDonald's.
Avoidable: What a bullfighter tries to do.
Baloney: Where some hem lines fall.
Barge: A boat that doesn't knock.
Bernadette: The act of torching a mortgage.
Burglarize: What a crook sees with.
Butterfly: The throwing of dairy products.
Counterfeiters: Workers who put together kitchen cabinets.
Eclipse: What an English barber does for a living.
Eye Dropper: A clumsy ophthalmologist.
Fishing dock: A surgeon on vacation.
Heroes: What a guy in a boat does.
Hooligan: A Hawaiian dancer suffering from deja vu.
Information: How military aircraft fly.
Left Bank: What the robber did when his bag was full of loot.
Medical Staff: A doctor's cane.
Microwave: Greeting from your shy friend.
Misty: How golfers create divots.
Out of Bounds: An exhausted kangaroo.
Outrank: To smell worse than the next guy.
Paradox: Two physicians.
Paralegal: A skydiving attorney.
Parasites: What you see from the top of the Eiffel Tower.
Pharmacist: A helper on the farm.
Polarize: What penguins see with.
Primate: Removing your spouse from in front of the TV.
Quack: A duck who shouldn't be permitted to practice medicine.
Quartermaster: Scouts who have earned their coin collection merit badge.
Relief: What trees do in the spring.
Rubberneck: What you do to relax your wife.
Satisfactory: The place where so-so goods are built.
Seamstress: Describes 250 pounds in a size six.
Selfish: What the owner of a seafood store does.
Subdued: Like, a guy, like, works on one of those, like, submarines, man!
Sudafed: Bringing litigation against a government official.
Vegetarian: Sportsman's word meaning “lousy hunter.”
Obviously, this is an incomplete (which could mean what happens when you put a series of folds on your paycheck) list. So when you're done studying, perhaps you'd like to submit a batch of new words of your own that I can steal for another column. Then we'll sell copies to Nancy's vocabulary class and maybe be able to Bernadette.
Send new words to Cole at burtseyevu @gmail. com or the Burton W. Cole page on Facebook. Burt also wishes to thank his readers for their expressions of sympathy and comfort on the recent passing of his wife, Terry.