My longtime hobby of thinking up wacky new meanings for tired old words was triggered again last week when I came across the word "ghaut."
A normal, boring person would just look it up in a dictionary but why waste an opportunity for some Monday madness.
Ghaut? Aha! I have it: a goat with a German accent.
In ordinary life, ghaut means a sort of ravine or narrow track through a mountain and is actually pronounced "gut." In Montserrat, there are numerous ghauts, and you can't visit there without learning the legend that anyone who drinks the cool spring water from Runway Ghaut will return to the island again and again.
My erstwhile friend Sonya Muddeen, who is sometimes an accountant and sometimes a communications consultant and sometimes a journalist and all the time a woman with a wonky sense of humour, once came up with this new word meaning: flatulent, an apartment in London you let your friend borrow.
Also, whenever anyone asked for the boss, she would say, "He is in his orifice,'' which is just plain disrespectful.
No wonder I am incorrigible. There are wild women out there who keep aiding and abetting me in concentrated nonsense.
When I was in high school and grammarian Marlene Davis (who writes the Language Matters column for this fab newspaper) was teaching us Shakespeare, some wag came up with a new definition for Caesar salad–Julius's last meal before he was slaughtered by the conspirators. Okay, okay, it was a lot funnier back then when we were sweating over iambic pentameter.
Some of my all-time favourites, which I have collected over the last two decades, are:
hoarse: Mr Ed after a political rally
humbug: a bee in a choir
diet: the word die with a typographical error
funnel: a tunnel at an amusement park.
Come on, it's easy. Just take up a copy of a newspaper or magazine and pick out any old word and think creatively. This game has tremendous benefits in a work environment.
Your boss will see you poring over the newspapers and think, aaah, there is an employee with a brain and one who is deep into public affairs. Also, when you are giggling at your own inventiveness, the boss will think what a bunch of happy employees he has, never mind the skinflint bonus he gave you last year.
To get you started on your contrarian way, here are nine notes of nonsense for your nice new collection of wonky words:
Stalemate: your ex-spouse.
Mortician: Morticia Addams' twin brother.
Childhood: a cute designer hoodie for a toddler.
Pumpkin: the cousin you got a job for at a gas station.
Candidate: a sweet friend you took out for drinks.
Perambulator: a punctuation mark to denote a roundabout way of saying something.
Antidote: medicine to cure stupidity. (If only, if only....)
Capacity: jaunty, stylish hat you wear when going to town to pose.
Bobolee: any woman mad enough to put herself with millionaire art collector Charles Saatchi after he publicly roughed up celebrity UK chef Nigella Lawson.
Think you can do better, e-mail me atwrenchelsa@hotmail.com