Wednesday Word Snoot: Silly Words

Courtesy of Graphican.com

You may remember that during the run-up to election 2012, Mitt Romney accused Barack Obama of using "silly word games." I half-heard that news report and what I heard was "silly words."  That set off a train of thought that ended, as many of my trains of thought do, with a spot of Googling. (Search engines are the best thing to happen to procrastination since ... crossword puzzles. You can waste a lot of time Googling, as with completing crossword puzzles, but you almost always learn something.)
Who knew there was a linguist who's compiled a list of the "100 Silliest Words in English?"  Check it out here.  My favorite is "bloviate," which means to speak pompously or brag. Some of the words on the list are actually phrases, but let us not split hairs.
Writer's Digest has compiled a list of funny words to help writers write funnier stories. I'm not sure I see the innate hilarity of words like "bulgur" and "knickers," but a fair number of the words on the list not only sound funny but have obscure definitions (which they don't give, I guess assuming that writers will know what they mean). And extra points to you if you know what a "bumfuzzle" is. (If you don't, check it out at dictionary dot com.
Wikipedia has an entry on "Inherently funny words" that's extremely academic but has some interesting pop culture references, including one to a Star Trek: Next Generation episode where Joe Piscopo tells Commander Data that words ending in K are always funny.
But if you want to know what words are really inherently funny, it's best to have a little kid around. If you find them repeating a word or phrase, it's going to be because it tickled their fancy. (My sister, for reasons unknown to the rest of the family, thought the name "Gene Siskel" was hilarious and was prone to using it to punctuate sentences when she was a little girl.) Dr. Seuss was the master of silly words, and his word "grinch" is now a permanent part of the lexicon.
Wouldn't you love to invent a silly word that got adopted by everyone?

Little Brother

Four years ago I wrote this story for a contest that challenged writers to come up with a tale about the newly elected president.  The winning story was terrific, an interior monologue the President had while smoking a cigarette bummed from a Secret Service Agent. I dug up this story after watching a night full of great speeches given by women at the DNC. Such amazing diversity--and I don't mean  ethnicity and race and creed. Sister Simone Campbell and Cecile Richards. (I remember Governor Ann Richards and think she would be very proud of her daughter.) And I thought of the women who broke the ground for the women who were at the podium tonight. The narrator in this story is one of those women who came before--a woman who once gave a keynote speech at the DNC herself.
This is the only piece of political fiction I've ever written. 

Little Brother

 

President Barack Obama came to Austin today.  Austin loves him.  When he and Joe Biden came through on the Obama-Rama campaign stop last year, the whole town went crazy.  This year the welcome is a bit more subdued, but still enthusiastic. 

He is here to make a speech and as he passed through the main terminal of the Austin-Bergstrom International Airport, there were some who expected he would stop for a photo opportunity and maybe mention me.  Instead he joked with reporters about football and kept moving.  Well he was preaching to the choir there.  The reporters were all local boys and Texas is football country after all.  We’re known for it.  That and birthing beauty queens. 

I don’t begrudge the slight. He’s a man in a hurry, that Obama and if talking foolishness with a couple of good ol’ boys is what it takes to play the game, then so be it.  The game was different in my time but I still played to win, even when I knew the odds were stacked against me.  When I was mentioned as a possible running mate for Jimmy Carter in 1976, I knew that was never going to happen and just accepted it.  Although it would have been nice to be asked.

I didn’t go to Harvard Law school like the President, although Harvard started accepting my kind back in 1950.  Instead I got my degree from Boston University Law School and then went home to Texas before getting involved in politics.  John Connally was governor then.  He was a man I could work with.  Not like Dolph Briscoe who was a Democrat too but acted more like a Republican sometimes. 

We butted heads over the Voting Rights Act of 1965.  You remember, that was the one that extended the rights of language minorities.  Dolph didn’t really see the point.  Well, he wouldn’t, would he?  I didn’t find much to admire about the second president from Texas but I’ll say this.  He spoke Spanish like a native and could communicate with all his constituents back when he was governor.