Word Definition Puns

These words and/or their definitions are made up and humorous.

• Chessnut - one who is crazy about playing chess


• Carpet - A pet you keep in your car


• Infantry - A baby tree


• (Add a letter) Diepole - a pole you tie the prisoner to when he is shot.


• Safety - Tea that's OK to drink


• Kilowatt - To murder ole Mr. Watt


• Nullifly - 1. To put someone on a no fly list 2. To kill a fly


• Detailed - a dog that's had its tail removed


• (change one letter) Defeeted - Having had one feet amputated or cut off accidentally


• Storage - The number of years it has been since the store was first built.


• Woofer - In German it is a synonym for "ein Barkenpantensnifferfer"


• Curtail - the tail of a mongrel (I suppose it could also be to shorten the tail of a mongrel.)


• Recur - A mongrel that reincarnates as a mongrel


• Friday - The day you fry something


• Hostage - The age of your host


• Napkin - a relative you take a siesta with


• Ratify - To increase the rat population


• Season - one's son who is born at sea


• Seasoning - Giving birth to a son at sea


• (Add a letter) Electrick - vote for Rick and put him in office


• (Change one letter) Incarmate - to have sex in an automobile


• Steward - the man who prepares the stew


• (Remove a letter) Cabage - how old a taxi is


• Flippant - an ant that performs somersaults


• Cashtration (n.): The act of buying a house, which renders the subject financially impotent for an indefinite period of time.


• Ignoranus: A person who's both stupid and an asshole.


• Intaxication: Euphoria at getting a tax refund, which lasts until you realize it was your money to start with.


• Reintarnation: Coming back to life as a hillbilly.


• Bozone (n.): The substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas from penetrating. The bozone layer, unfortunately, shows little sign of breaking down in the near future.


• Foreploy: Any misrepresentation about yourself for the purpose of getting laid.


• Giraffiti: Vandalism spray-painted very, very high.


• Sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.


• Inoculatte: To take coffee intravenously when you are running late.


• Osteopornosis: A degenerate disease. (This one got extra credit.)


• Karmageddon: It's like, when everybody is sending off all these really bad vibes, right? And then, like, the Earth explodes and it's, like, a serious bummer.


• Decafalon (n.): The gruelling event of getting through the day consuming only things that are good for you.


• Glibido: All talk and no action.


• Dopeler Effect: The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.


• Arachnoleptic Fit (n.): The frantic dance performed just after you've accidentally walked through a spider web.


• Beelzebug (n.): Satan in the form of a mosquito, that gets into your bedroom at three in the morning and cannot be cast out.


• Caterpallor (n.): The color you turn after finding half a worm in the fruit you're eating.


• coffee, n. the person upon whom one coughs.


• flabbergasted, adj. appalled by discovering how much weight one has gained.


• abdicate, v. to give up all hope of ever having a flat stomach.


• esplanade, v. to attempt an explanation while drunk.


• willy-nilly, adj. impotent.


• negligent, adj. absentmindedly answering the door when wearing only a nightgown.


• lymph, v. to walk with a lisp.


• gargoyle, n. olive-flavored mouthwash.


• flatulence, n. emergency vehicle that picks up someone who has been run over by a steamroller.


• balderdash, n. a rapidly receding hairline..


• testicle, n. a humorous question on an exam.


• rectitude, n. the formal, dignified bearing adopted by proctologists.


• pokemon, n.. a Rastafarian proctologist.


• oyster, n. a person who sprinkles his conversation with Yiddishisms.


• Frisbeetarianism, n. the belief that, after death, the soul flies up onto the roof and gets stuck there.


• circumvent, n. an opening in the front of boxer shorts worn by Jewish men.

Invented languages take on a life of their own / Once the province of a few, new tongues flourish through Net (San Francisco Chronicle)

In any language, Sonja Elen Kisa was depressed. The world was overwhelming, and the thoughts that swirled through her mind in French, English, German or Esperanto echoed that. So Kisa, 28, a student and translator in Toronto, decided to create her own...

In any language, Sonja Elen Kisa was depressed.

The world was overwhelming, and the thoughts that swirled through her mind in French, English, German or Esperanto echoed that.

So Kisa, 28, a student and translator in Toronto, decided to create her own language, something simple that would help clarify her thinking. She called it Toki Pona - "good language" - and gave it just 120 words.

"Ale li pona," she told herself. "Everything will be OK."

Kisa eventually sorted through her thoughts and, to her great surprise, her language took off, with more than 100 speakers today, singing Toki Pona songs, writing Toki Pona poems and chatting with Toki Pona words.

It's all part of a weirdly Babel-esque boom of new languages. Once the private arena of J.R.R. Tolkien, Esperanto speakers and grunting Klingon fanatics, invented languages have flourished on the Internet and begun creeping into the public domain.

The Web site Langmaker.com now lists more than 1,000 language inventors and 1,902 made-up languages, from Ayvarith to Zyem.

The language inventors have, of course, created a word to describe what they do - "conlang," short for constructed languages.

Created languages may have no hope of supplanting the real thing, but for most conlangers, that is hardly the goal. Hobbyists such as Kisa find it a fun or therapeutic practice. Linguists can use conlangs to dissect how real language works. For a select few who write fiction or work for Hollywood, conlanging can even be a moneymaker.

But to the majority of linguaphiles, conlangs are simply art. Their palette holds not paints but the buzz of the letter "z," the hiss of an "s," the trill of an Italian "r."

And sometimes the howl of a Klingon scream: "Hab SoSlI' Quch!"

"Your mother has a smooth forehead!"

In this realm of art, Toki Pona is white canvas with scattered brush strokes of primary colors.

Kisa created Toki Pona as an exercise in minimalism, looking for the core vocabulary necessary to communicate. With only 120 words, a Toki Pona speaker must combine words to express more complicated ideas. For example, the Toki Pona phrase for "friend" is "jan pona" (the "j" sounds like a "y"), literally "good person."

Kisa, who is studying speech language therapy, tried to focus Toki Pona's vocabulary on basic, positive concepts.

"It has sort of a Zen or Taoist nature to it," Kisa said.

Tolkien liked to call invented language his secret vice. He spent hours at the solitary hobby, designing grammars and modifying words from Latin, Finnish, Welsh and others for his languages.

Eventually, his languages needed tongues to speak them, and those speakers needed a place to live. And thus Middle-Earth was born, with Tolkien's languages becoming the Sindarin and Quenya of the Elves, the Khuzdul of the Dwarves, and the Black Speech of the Orcs.

In the 12th century, the nun Hildegard of Bingen developed a rudimentary conlang she called Lingua Ignota, Latin for "unknown language" No one knows its purpose. All that survives is a short passage and a list of 1,012 terms arranged from the highest form, "God," to the lowest, "cricket."

Esperanto was created in the late 19th century by Polish doctor Ludovic Zamenhof. His dream was to give humanity a common international language that would be simple to learn. Esperanto's vocabulary is small, word order does not matter and there are no irregular verbs.

"Gi estas iom lingvo idealisma," said William B. Harris, director of the central office of the Esperanto League for North America, in California. "It's somewhat of an idealistic language."

Today, as many as 2 million people speak Esperanto, which conlangers call an "auxlang," or auxiliary language.

Learning is the easy part. Actually creating a language is a task only for the very tenacious. It took Kisa a year to put hers together, and her language was built to be basic.

It is not enough simply to replace existing words with invented ones. To a conlanger, such a construction would be a mere code.

The conlanger considers many factors, starting with the sound of the language. Linguists call it phonaesthetics; Germans call it Sprachgefuhl - "speech feeling."

Tricky to define, it's that certain quality that makes French the language of love and German the language that "makes you want to conquer Poland," said John Quijada, a Web site developer in Sacramento who created Ithkuil

There are rules to this game. Human languages - known as "natlangs," for natural languages - follow universal linguistic patterns. For example, few human languages use the raspberry sound, but all have an "ah" sound. To create a pseudo-natlang, the conlanger also should follow those rules.

Of course, there are instances when one doesn't want to follow the rules. In creating Klingon for "Star Trek," Marc Okrand, 59, said, "I looked at all those kinds of rules and then violated them on purpose."

If a conlang is to be a language for nonhumans, the conlanger must consider their biology - if they lack teeth or vocal cords, the language's sounds will be constrained accordingly.

The conlanger also must ponder the grammar. For example, will the word order be subject-verb-object, as in English, or perhaps object-subject-verb, following the example of Yoda?

Okrand chose the rarest of grammatical structures, object-verb-subject. A Klingon would say, "The Enterprise boarded I." He purposely picked sounds that never would be found together in the same human language.

All this has added up to one alien manner of speech.

The challenge has not deterred serious Klingonists, who number perhaps a few hundred worldwide. Djorn X. Oqvist, 33, a Swedish linguistics student and founder of the Klingon Academy, said you must be creative with Klingon's 2,600 words.

For example, he said, there is no way to say: "Park the car." No problem. Klingon speakers "dock" their vehicles.

The difference between "park" and "dock" illustrates how languages can talk about similar things but conjure subtly different images.

The phenomenon was noted by early 20th century linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf. They proposed a theory that language had the power to broaden or constrain a speaker's thoughts. That is, it is hard to think about concepts without the specific words to express them.

In 1955, sociologist James Cooke Brown came up with an idea to test the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. He would train students in a new language, and look at how their thinking changed.

He knew he could not use a natlang - it would be impossible to separate language from the influence of culture. So Brown invented a cultureless language, Loglan - short for "logical language."

Just as scientists use mice as a model for the human body, Loglan would be a model language for his laboratory of thought.

Brown borrowed vocabulary from English, French, German, Chinese, Hindi, Spanish, Russian and Japanese - the eight most widely spoken languages at the time.

Loglan was designed to be free of irregularity and ambiguity. The Loglan lexicon, containing more than 10,000 words, is made up of five-letter root words and short, one- or two-letter modifiers. The roots can be combined to make new six-letter words.

He included words for the mathematical Boolean variables such as "and," "or inclusive" and "or exclusive" to encourage clear, logical thinking.

As it turned out, creating the language wasn't the hardest part. Like many successful conlangers, Brown struggled to maintain control over his creation.

He founded the Loglan Institute in San Diego in the 1970s to bring others into the project, but then was upset when they didn't agree with his ideas.

"In 1984 there was a knock-down, drag-out battle over this," said Bob LeChevalier, 53, who was a member at the time. The institute fell apart and Brown was never able to conduct his great experiment.

LeChevalier and others developed Lojban, a language built on identical principles as Loglan. LeChevalier estimates there are between 500 and 1,000 Lojban speakers.

Kisa, too, has wrestled with the growing pains of her creation.

Once a language is released from the notebooks and index cards of its birth, other speakers might use it for purposes its creator never intended.

Since Kisa let Toki Pona loose on the Internet in 2001, it has spread from Toronto to speakers all over the world.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology routinely offers a seminar about the language. Kisa has received e-mails from Russians learning Toki Pona and a Finnish therapist who wants to teach it to his depressed patients.

Occasionally these correspondents offer criticism as well as praise. Some want to express complicated thoughts in Toki Pona, running counter to its design.

Kisa has given in to a few complaints. It's only natural for language to evolve, she said.

"Tenpo ni la toki pona li kama suli. Jan mute li kepeken e ona," she said. "It's like a living thing now."

An Indian Nation Preserves Its Heritage With a Magic Joystick (The New York Sun)

Video games can become a way to learn languages and culture

An Indian Nation Preserves Its Heritage With a Magic Joystick

Like many 8-year-old boys, Eli Langley loves video games. The ins and outs of Nintendo and PlayStation characters, puzzles, and role-playing adventures are much more accessible to him than, say, the oral traditions or hunting techniques of his Coushatta Tribe's ancestors. His latest obsession is trying to restore the powers and magic of a character named Sora in the "Kingdom Hearts" game for Nintendo DS.

"If I sleep on it, I think I'll beat it," Eli said one night after school and football practice. "I'm not modest, I know I'll do it."

Eli's love of gaming got his mother, Linda, and several of her tribe's leaders thinking: Could the tribe harness the power of video games and their mighty influence over today's young people to promote cultural learning? Could a game about American Indian culture and language be of interest to a plugged-in child like her son?

"We wanted to find something new, something fun, to engage our younger members," the tribe's chairman, Kevin Sickey, said. "We need to draw strength from our past, while doing everything we can to preserve our future."

After months of working with a high-tech gaming development firm and investing thousands of dollars, that mission is becoming a reality with the creation of a state-of-the-art museum called the Coushatta Heritage Center, soon to be built in Elton, La.

In fact, Eli recently helped test a prototype 3-D video game for the museum, in which players are able to explore a virtual world in order to experience how members of the Coushatta Tribe traditionally interacted with their environment and used handmade tools to survive.

Where a typical video game might feature a European-looking spaceman running around on an alien planet with a laser gun, this game prototype featured a Coushatta hero with darker skin and a build more like a traditional member of the tribe, with a sinewy and slightly muscular upper body and legs. True to tribal history, the character carried a bow and arrow, as well as a blowgun to hunt small animals. His game-play environment was modeled after the traditional Coushatta forests, and he received instructions in the game from a computerized elder who asked him to collect firewood for warmth and pine needles to weave baskets.

Eli was able to manipulate the character via a game controller, just as he would make Super Mario jump and run in a Nintendo game. If his character picked up wood that was too close to a pond, the guiding elder would tell him that the wood bundles were too wet to be used.

"It's kind of boring right now because it's only a prototype," Eli explained. "It'll get better."

Eli's mother couldn't be happier about this modern-day video game creation story, which she has played a large role in promoting through her role as an anthropologist at McNeese State University in Lake Charles, La. "We saw that the first day of testing," she recalled. "I couldn't get him to get off it. He sat and he played, and he made the character run through the landscapes."

Ms. Langley is as pumped as a video game fanatic to have her son join other Native kids from her community as guinea pigs for this mission. "They were so hooked," she recalled of one demo day. "We knew we were on to something."

But there is an educational method behind the fun. "What we're really trying to do is use modern learning technology to help educate about the tribe and to help preserve the language and the culture for future generations," said John Purdy, president of Red Knight Learning Systems of Dallas, the firm the Coushatta Tribe has contracted with to help develop its digital learning center. "Young people have not always been able to pick up much on their language and their tribe's history."

The Coushatta partnership with Red Night, which began early this year, will make the tribe one of a handful in the nation with a museum that features modern immersive, multimedia learning exhibits designed to preserve tribal language and heritage.

Indian leaders say that as the concept of tribal self-determination has taken steam since the 1960s, more tribes have taken ownership over their representation in museums. The National Museum of the American Indian in Washington D.C., which has received funding from dozens of tribes, is but one symbol of the movement. Since its opening in 2004, it has featured many "living history" video exhibits with tribal cultures being explained by contemporary American Indians via film and other electronic means.

Ms. Langley prefers to call the Coushatta museum a digital center because museums have often held negative connotations for Native people, she said. Many non-Indian museums, like the Smithsonian Institution, host exhibits featuring Indian bones and sacred artifacts, a practice that fundamentally violates the cultural ideologies of many tribes.

By most accounts, the Coushatta Heritage Center will take tribal museums to an even higher playing field. Ground has already been broken for the nearly 10,000-foot facility that will house the unique technological learning experiment, and leaders are tentatively expecting the museum to open in the fall of 2008.

Video games won't be the only unique aspect of the museum. Red Knight is also designing an immersive theater, which will feature computerized sound effects and "smell cartridges" that will allow visitors to sense and feel like they've walked into the Coushatta woods in the evening. A timeline wall will allow visitors to "interact with history" -- by sliding a display monitor along the wall, they will able to see and hear the tribe's history. Several Kosati language programs will be available, and basket-making games also will allow visitors to make their own virtual Coushatta basket.

The center, according to Ms. Langley, will also include interactive and physical exhibits exploring the tribe's prophecies and stories from their more than 500-year history. The Kosati language will be integrated into all exhibits, and the Heritage Center will also function as a tribal library, archive, and language learning center for Coushatta tribal members.

Ms. Langley insists that those who are resistant to or reluctant to use technology will still find much to enjoy at the museum. "You will not have to be a video game expert to get a lot out of it," she said.

Mr. Purdy of Red Knight said tribal leaders were adamant that they didn't want this project to turn out like any old museum. After researching the current field of tribal museums, he believes that the Coushatta Heritage Center "will be one of the more high-tech and unique buildings and heritage centers among American Indian tribes in the nation."

Technology, of course, does not come cheaply. No one interviewed for this story would give exact numbers, but some say the video-game aspects of the heritage museum alone will cost upwards of six figures. The Coushatta Tribe is paying for the project via tribal casino profits and other fund raising, as well as from grant money from the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and from the Smithsonian.

"The amount of resources that are being poured into this initiative are unprecedented," the tribe's vice chairman, David Sickey, said. "It serves a dual purpose: serving the generations that are coming up and educating our non-Indian friends as well."It's crucial for tribal councils to endorse these types of forward-thinking initiatives, Mr. Sickey said.

"That's one thing I've really noticed about the tribe," Mr. Purdy said. "They do seem to spend a lot of their money and energy into helping out their own people."

With a kid like Eli at the controls, that mindset may be prove to be useful. "He likes complicated games," Ms. Langley said.

"Yeah, they can't be boring," Eli chimed in over his mom. "They're not going to be fun unless they mess me up a little."

The original article can be found here.