Posts Tagged With: vocabulary

Paul’s Awesome English Dictionary – Today’s Word, Lockiness

Sometimes words come about gradually. You hear them for a while before noticing and adopting them into your vocabularly. Sometimes your work or studies require you to coin a new word so as to avoid using a sentence over and over when the new bon mot will do quite nicely. And then sometimes, the world suddenly gives birth to a glorious, brilliant, and beautiful new word just as the Greek god Zeus gave birth to the wise, powerful, and beautiful goddess Athena by pulling her out of his split-open head.*

And NOW, TODAY’S FEATURED WORD

LOCKINESS

courtesy of the wonderful wordsmith, Christee Gabour Atwood

* = A painful birth, you bet.

 

– Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef, Ph.D.

My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.

Advertisement
Categories: Paul's Awesome Dictionay | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Bad Advice Friday, 4-28-17

Oh my gosh. It’s Friday. So, I shall once more be dispensing bad advice As usual, the advice will stupendously bad. You know it will be so as I had overwritten the file with my previous answers and to re-answer. I mean how can you trust advice from a person who does that?

JBL asks: Will this be on the test?

Dear JBL: Yes, it will. Unfortunately, you don’t know what test. I strongly urge you to go to every school you can and take every test. If you don’t answer the question, you will get a zero for it. Indeed if you miss the test completely, you’ll fail the test and fail the course, and get kicked out of your university. And you paid a lot of money getting into that university. You won’t graduate. There will go your dream of becoming an astronaut and of being the first person on Mars. Oh, and here’s foolproof way of acing every test. Simply tattoo every fact and theorem you’ve run across onto your body. Now it’s quite possible, that the tattooed answer will be under your clothes. In this case, you’ll have to strip. If the teacher complains, say you’re allergic to clothes. If the answer is on your butt, ask the student behind you (See what I did there?) to read the answer. Ask nicely; manners are always in fashion.

************************

MA asks: Can yard bunnies do multiplication problems?

Dear MA: Oh yes. But they’re shy. They just don’t talk to anyone. You have to gain their trust. You have to get down to their level. This means crawling up to them and feeding them pellets. Rabbits are terrified if they talk to people as they fear by doing will stop the supply of pellets. So talk to them in a soothing voice. Tell them that you will provide gourmet pellets if they solve multiplication problems for you. This is known in economics as incentivizing the bunny.

************************

RAS asks: How do I teach my dog Trotsky to play chess?

Dear RAS: You must learn to speak dog. This is not as hard as it might seem given the smallness of the canine vocabulary when compared to English. Conjugating verbs verb in Dog is much easier than in Dog than in English and, my gosh, much easier than in French. To illustrate, for “Am Hungry.”

French:
J’ai faim.
Tu as faim.
Il a faim.
Nous avons faim.
Vous avez faim.
Ils ont faim.

English:
I am hungry.
You are hungry.
It is hungry.
We are hungry.
They are hungry.

Note there are six different conjugations in French: ai, as, a, avons, avez, and ont. English is easier with only three different conjugations: am, are, and is. However, Dog conjugation for “am hungry” has an elegant simplicity to it.

Dog:
Woof!

There are no cases for you (familiar or polite), for we, it, or they. That makes learning the dog vocabulary easy. Indeed the word, “woof,” is the words for literally dozens of nouns and verbs. Dog convey meaning by intoning their “woof” differently for each instance. You will need to practice your canine intonations and indeed, inflections as well. Get practicing.

************************

LF asks: Why can’t pigs fly?

Dear LF: They can! They can! You just need a big enough catapult. Try getting your catapult at CostcoTM; they carry everything. Get your catapult while you can. As of press time, there’s no government regulation about flinging pigs great distances in your neighborhood, but how long can that last given the government has seen fit to regulate commercial aviation.

************************

BRW asked: I point a red laser light at the neigbhor’s blinds when they are gone. The cats destroy the blinds chasing the red dot. Am I evil? (Taken from a meme.)

Dear BRW: Only if your neighbors are annoying. And if they’re annoying to you, they’re likely to be annoying to others on your street as well. In this case, wait until your irritating neighbors leave their house with lit candles. Point the laser beam at the candle. The cats will attack the red dot on the candle. The candle will fall to the ground. The rug will catch fire. The house will burn down. The neighbors will leave. (Gosh, neighbors is a hard word to spell. Another reason to see them go.) It’s much better to be proactive like this then to let your resentment against them fester into something serious. That benefits no one.

************************

LHH asks: Over the top, or under the weather: which is best for a Hump day? And are there differences by season?

Dear LHH: If you want to be over the top for weather, you need to go to the North Pole. But with global warming, you can’t guarantee solid ice for your lawn chair. On the other hand, you could be the first person to surf the pole. In contrast, you’ll under the weather at the South Pole. While the South is over a mile thick layer of ice, it is under the Earth. There is nothing underneath you. Nothing! You’ll fall. You see because of gravity, everything falls down. At the South Pole, there is no more down. The scientists at this pole meet this existential threat by constructing buildings. The ceilings on these upside down buildings prevent the people there from falling off the planet. The fear, however, persists as in this line from an angst-filled song, “Put our hands in the air like the ceiling can’t hold us.” Some polar scientists hew to a more devil-may care philosophy as evidenced by the line, “dancing on the ceiling.” If you must go outside when at the South Pole, you must, must wear boots with VelcroTM soles and stay on the Velcro paths. Otherwise, you fall off the Earth. This is true for Hump day, the other days of the week, and for the two seasons of day and night. The Laws of Physics never sleep.

************************

LF states: A question for Bad Advice Friday? I can’t think. (This is from memory. I overwrote the file where I answered this.)

Dear LF: Thinking is overrated. Millions of people in a few select professions never think, politicians and human billiard balls (A surprisingly popular sport) come to mind. But if you’re really having trouble thinking and would like to start again, I have two suggestions. First, join the French Foreign Legion. You’ll have plenty of undisturbed time to conjure up a thought as you’re marching under the hot Saharan Sun. However, as people join the Legion to forget, you’ll immediately forget what idea you created. But you will have started thinking again and that’s the main thing. Second, commit a crime, a crime so horrible that you will be spending years in solitary confinement. The serene, tranquil, undisturbed aura of your own is enormously conducive to thought. Try it and see!

– Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef

My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.

Categories: bad advice Friday | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Beninese Peanut Sauce

Beninese Appetizer

PEANUT SAUCE

INGREDIENTSpeanutsauce

1 small tomato
1 small onion
2 tablespoons peanut oil
1½ tablespoons chili powder
¼ teaspoon salt
1 cube MaggiTM beef bouillon*
1 cup water
10 tablespoons smooth peanut butter

* = While other boullion cubes work fine, Maggi’s are incredibly popular in Africa.

SPECIAL UTENSIL

blender

Makes 1½ cups. Takes 35 minutes.

PREPARATION

Puree tomato in blender. Mince onion. Add onion and peanut oil to pot. Sauté at medium-high heat for 5 minutes or until onion softens. Stir frequently. Add tomato puree, chili powder, and salt. Reduce heat to low and sauté for 3 minutes. Stir frequently.

Crush boullion cube. (This makes it dissolve quicker.) Add bouillon and water. Bring to boil using high heat. Stir frequently. Add peanut butter. Reduce heat to low. Simmer for 15 minutes or until sauces thickens to your liking. Stir frequently. This is served in Benin with boiled yam. It also goes well with rice.

TIDBITS

1) Peanut Sauce is, of course, an anagram for Tuna Ape Cues. Queen Mary I hated the theater, thinking it immoral. She tried fervently to ban it altogether, but succeeded only in driving theater going underground. People attended ribald plays in people’s attics where such animalistic passions such as hand holding and improv comedy took place. Mary I could not abide this licentiousness, so she imposed hateful regulations, such as having all roles played by gorillas holding tuna.

2) It’s important to realize that Joe Ape’s vocabulary was, and still is, quite limited, making line memorization challenging. And as with humans, line retention goes down while holding tuna. So, stage hands constantly cued the tuna holding apes. Hence, “Tuna Ape Cues.” The next queen, Elizabeth permitted human actors. To honor his new patron, Shakespeare, playwright, chef, and anagrammatist, turned Tuna Apes Cues into Peanut Sauce. His peanut sauce was tasty. What luck!

 

– Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef

My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.

Categories: cuisine, history | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Danish Millionbøf

Danish Entree

MILLIONBØF

INGREDIENTSMillionBof-

1 pound potatoes
1 large onion
2 teaspoons butter
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
1 pound ground beef (85% lean is best)
2 tablespoons flour
1¾ cups beef stock
¼ teaspoon pepper
½ teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons gravy browning or dark gravy

Makes 4 bowls. Takes 50 minutes.

PREPARATION

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Peel potatoes. Cut potatoes into fourths. Put potato fourths in large pot. Boil on high heat for 20 minutes.

While potatoes are boiling, dice onion. Add onion, butter, and vegetable oil to pan. Sauté at medium heat for 5 minutes or until it starts to brown or BEGINS TO SOFTEN. Stir frequently. Add ground beef. Reduce heat to medium. Cook for 3-to-5 minutes or until beef starts to brown. Stir occasionally.

After potatoes have been boiled for 20 minutes, remove them from pot. Put potatoes in large mixing bowl. Mash them. Add flour to pan with ground beef. Stir until well blended. Add beef stock, pepper, and salt.. Bring to boil using high heat. Stir frequently. Reduce heat to low-medium and simmer for 20 minutes or until less than half of the liquid is left. Stir occasionally. Add gravy browning. Stir until well blended. Serve over mashed potatoes.

TIDBITS

1) Bøf is Danish for beef. Bøf is also a palindrome for føb. Føb isn’t Danish for anything, although the Danes do have a word for everything that exists. Føb is just a reserve word the Danes have just in case something really new is discovered, such as a carnivorous, ambulatory fig looking tree on Mars. (CAMFLTOM)

2) The Danish Official Word Naming Association (DOWNA) would then look down their list of approved new words. If føb were at the top of the list, then the CAMFTOM would be called “føb.”

3) There’s more. Take the first letter away from føb and you get øf, the Danish word for oink. Now you know both of Denmark’s really necessary words. Remember the song, “If I could talk to the Danes?” Well, now you can. Go visit Denmark. Visit today, before you lose your vocabulary.

– Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef

My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.

 

Categories: cuisine, humor, international | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Blog at WordPress.com.

%d bloggers like this: