The Sporadic Curmudgeon

Today I had a rare opportunity at work to do some nice, old-fashioned non-brain-bending HTML formatting for a client. It was a “Terms and Conditions” page for a limousine service, and the copy arrived as a Word file, the format most dreaded by web developers.

The reason is that you can’t just copy and paste Word docs onto a web page; you must first strip out all of the the illegal garbage characters Microsoft products always insert into their documents whether you want them to or not. That’s why you see so many web pages with the apostrophes replaced with little boxes — they put a “fancy” curved apostrophe in, even though you actually typed the straight one on your keyboard. It’s the same deal with quotation marks. Thus, you must pay far more attention to the content than usual when preparing it for the internet.

It turns out there was, get this, a Regurgitation Clause in the contract! I’ve seen a lot of Terms and Conditions contracts over the years, but this was a new one on me. It makes perfect sense: if you hire a limo and you get drunk and puke all over the seats, you have to pay an extra $200 even if you tried to clean it up yourself. This seems reasonable; it takes a lot of work to get the memorable perfume of an epic technicolor yawn out of the upholstery.

I don’t know why, but the existence of a Regurgitation Clause made me inordinately happy.

I have decided that from now on, all legal contracts should have Regurgitation Clauses. It just feels right, deep down in my gut.

For a few years now I’ve been corresponding off-and-on with the editor of The Devil’s Dictionary X, a hilarious and worthy sequel to Ambrose Bierce’s classic work, The Devil’s Dictionary, and we have become long-distance friends.

Eventually I began sending him definitions of my own, some of which made their way in and some of which didn’t. Therefore I’m going to inflict them on you.

Birthday

An annual 24-hour chink in one’s cynicism, during which a few quick jabs of disappointment can inflict wounds that fester for a lifetime.

See also Anniversary, Christmas, Mother’s Day, Valentine’s Day, etc.

Demoticon

To add spaces between letters and/or punctuation to keep your text-messaging client from turning them into an annoying little image.

Example usage: “I demoticoned that last sentence because for some damned reason the ‘(x)’ kept turning into a tiny picture of a woman.”

(I coined this word.)

Environmentionalist

Someone who talks green but walks magenta.

(Another word I came up with.)

Feng Shui

1. Expensive Chinese fertilizer.

2. Mandarin for “Sinophilic pansy.”

Inflated Self-Worth

Washing your hands before, not after, you pee.

Late Middle Age

The time of life when the number of people who would like to see you naked dwindles to the readership of that one really weird website.

Living

The process of attaching unpleasant memories to geographic coordinates.

Misunderestimate

To inadequately assess the popularity of corruption and stupidity.

Neolojism

A newly-coined sex word.

(Another word I invented, and thus a rare example of a recursive definition.)

Prostitution

1. A democratic institution hated by wealthy males, who consider mercenary women their private game preserve.

2. A policeman’s cudgel used to beat the ugly.

Rectify

To correct. From the Latin for become an asshole.

Torture

The application of extreme physical discomfort so as to extract a pretext.