by FRANCIS GRECOROMACOLLUDEN, Alternate Reality News Service National ? Writer
It is reported to be a science, although it can also contain dark arts. It has a mainstream and it has many fringes. You can deride it when it is as usual (in fact, a whole sub-genre of humour does just that). Calling somebody this sort of animal can be either a compliment or an insult, depending upon the context. It can party. It apparently makes strange bedfellows. It can be correct. And, it can be incorrect. It can occur in your office, although it can also be personal. It can even be about personal destruction.
It is a word, in all of its forms, that has suddenly disappeared from the English language.
"From the context in which the disappeared word, err, appears," said famed British lexicographer Sir Basalt Subscripte, "we can infer that it has something to do with governments and such, although, obviously, given the circumstances, we're not sure how."
In live speech, people stumble around the word, as if it is on the tips of their tongues and they will remember it at any moment. Unfortunately, they don't.
"It was sooooo embarrassing!" MSNBC...some kind of commentator Rachel Maddow commentated. "I wanted to accuse Pat Buchanan of supporting Republican dirty...things, but I couldn't remember the word for what they were. He started laughing. I hate when Pat Buchanan laughs - he sounds like an asthmatic donkey - a malevolent asthmatic donkey!"
After an initial period of awkwardness, pundits found alternatives to the words they could no longer use. Fox commentator Bill O'reilly, for instance, coined the term "dirty electoralitics" before Maddow could get to it. Anchor Brian Williams started talking about "post-electoral processes as usual" on NBC. Personal advice columnist Amritsar Al-Falloudjianapour devoted several segments of her radio show to "office interpersonal intrigues with potentially devastating consequences on people?s productivity and ability to keep their jobs."
"They're ugly locutions," Maddow allowed, "but they get the point across. Damn O'reilly!"
The word has also been erased from all recorded speech. This curious fact allows us to see that the word disappeared from human thought last Thursday at approximately 8:23 Eastern Standard Time: up to that moment, Keith Olbermann is using the word, which has become a hiss on the recorded video, while after that, he seems befuddled every time he appears to be trying to say it.
The word has also disappeared from all literary sources. In the dictionary, for example, there is a big white gap between the words "politeness" and "polka."
"It starts with the letters 'p o l,'" Sir Basalt mused, "followed by either an 'i' or a 'j.' Politodinous? Politurrmuration? Poljack? My stars and garters, but this is lexicographically exciting!"
This is the first time in history that a word has disappeared from use so abruptly. "Well, actually, we don't know that for sure," Sir Basalt demurred. "I mean, how could we?" I was going to use an analogy to the dinosaurs, but Sir Basalt shot that down, too: "Hard to imagine the linguistic equivalent of a huge meteorite?a new Danielle Steele book comes close, I suppose, and yet?"
Linguist Noam Chomsky mused that - yes, that Noam Chomsky. He was a linguist long before he was a...some kind of activist. Anyway, he mused that the deep structures of the human brain that - no, really, get over the whole activist thing, whatever kind he is - Chomsky is a serious academic who has been studying language use and the human brain for decades, and he mused that something must have triggered a kind of spasm in the -
You're not going to let the Chomsky activist thing go, are you? Okay, well, he was just speaking off the cuff, and a lot of people in the field already disagree with what he said. No great loss to the article.
People who practice the missing word have mixed feelings on its disappearance. Vice President Dick Cheney said, "It's an Iranian plot to embarrass the government of the United States of America, and her people! What are we waiting for - an attack on our language's noun-verb-noun structure? We must act against these madmen now or risk losing our ability to communicate at all!"
President Bush had a more philosophical response. "I don't care what you call me," he announced in an address to the Republican nominating convention, "long as I can keep my enduring bases in Iraq. Hee hee."
"The loss of the word and its derivatives doesn't seem to have in any way affected the running of the government," Maddow commented. "Unfortunately?"