Mobile Savages and Their River Plate Tectonics (a Dictionary of Verbs in English and a Glossary as Guide to Our Hang)

(The Manifesto)



"Connecticut" means "Long Tidal River" in Mohegan (not Mohican nor Mohawk, they are different tribes) and it is one phenomenally understated coincidence that it's also two connected antonyms in English: “connect” and “cut“. Listen to children, they know things. The river is where two ancient land masses collided forming part of Pangaea. When the long tidal river known as the Gulf Stream took Europe back home, it left with it a chunk of England we've been calling "New England" long before we knew England left us before we left it. It also deposited Noah Webster, the Father of American English, on the Eastern side of this Connecticut River. New York State knew what was up. Right after the Revolution it mobilized troops against other fledgling States to move its border up to this same Eastern side of the River thereby keeping Old England at its proper geographical New England border; the Feds stepped in and bungled the whole thing up though and Connecticut was allowed to remain connected and cut. Jorge Luis Borges grew up in a neighborhood called Palermo in Argentina, not Sicily. His grandmother was English and his mother came from across the Rio de la Plata in Uruguay. Rio de la Plata, like most famous rivers, is in fact not a river at all, but a tidal estuary. Rio de la Plata also has an older name most people think is a younger name. It was not named because it sits at the center of the South American Plate; the name is older than that info. Sir Francis Drake was the first to call it "The River Plate" after the pirate word for silver and gold booty, "plate." Though it's true the word "plate" came from the Spanish "plata" for silver, "Rio de la Plata" is in fact a translation of "River Plate" into Spanish --not a translation back into Spanish, a translation into Spanish; the Spanish word formed the root of an English name that was then translated into Spanish (and unsurprisingly, “booty” is also an anglicized slang, from the French “butin“ for “plunder“). This river deposits 57 million cubic meters of silt into the Atlantic each year which are then ushered by the Falkland Island Current deep into the Atlantic to Africa, back across to the Caribbean, and up and around via the Gulf Stream. When Africa slammed into Europe it left Italy behind, created the Alps to protect the marooned Africans from invading hyperborean hordes, and deposited me along the River Po sifting for clues. One could make a strong argument that I should have deposited myself in Crete or along the Indus if I really wanted to get down to the bottom of it, but since the nature of these mobile savages is that they move I thought getting close might yield better results than getting exact. In other words, I’d rather encounter them out on the vibrant and windy streets than in their shaded and dusty homes.

Welcome to the Vox Super Voltus’ ever growing collection of geophilological faulterings. In our process of learning languages, new biproduct or runoff languages fall out of the fissures in between. Over-sensitivity might have us thinking up names for these new languages, but as we all truly know (in this era at least) they already have a name: English. And as English is in constant mutation wherein new languages are constantly falling out of its own fissures, we need names for those languages too. Their names: English, for now.


Fight it all you want, but one way or another "this" language needs a name and seeing as all names are limiting I currently vote for the name with the widest breathe: English. As Christopher Damien Leo I will never have a chance to be Michael Steven Henderson or Mary Elizabeth Schumaker. I am limited to being simply Christopher Damien Leo. When a band is eager to tell you what genre of music they play I will be eager to tell you without listening, "they suck." So it is in fact this increasing lack of connection I feel the language I speak having with the language one speaks in the country of England that strengthens my support for calling my language "English" as well. I long for the day when saying "my language is called English" sounds as absurd and magical as if I were to say "my language is called Swahili." The word English belongs to the English like the icon of the New York City skyline belongs to me and the rest of my fellow Newyorkers -- It doesn't. They are both public domain. As Simon Winchester courageously unveiled (or to some, sacrilegiously snitched) in his novel, The Professor and the Madman, some of the most prolific contributors to the bible we call the Oxford English Dictionary were murderers, auto-castrators, and lunatics, both incarcerated and on the run. From top to the bottom, English remains savage and free. And if it can be called a murderer, then it can also be called a suicider and a phoenix.

Furthermore, when the English one speaks in America becomes something entirely different from the English one speaks in England which will become something entirely different from the English spoken elsewhere as a lingua franca and the blood of the Germanic Angles from hence we draw the word is diluted down to but a negligible part of the potion, these languages will rename themselves, organically. When the Greeks formed a new city in a perfect port on the southwestern coast of Italy they named it "Neapolis" -- New City. As the city moved further and further away from new it moved closer and closer to "Napoli" and eventually like the city on the southwestern coast of Florida, we have cities like "Naples" which I believe will one day be called "Apples" seeing as they grow oranges in Florida and, like I said, things have a way of naming themselves their opposite to stay free. Think about how the Andalusians named the erotic dance done by brown people "flamenco" after the people they deemed to be at their polar opposite, the Flemish. Or how the Jamaicans named their cocktail with fiery ginger root the "Moscow Mule." Or, getting back to the states and plates, "Nevada" means "land of snow" in Spanish and "Arizona" means "good oaks" in Basque though there are no oaks, snow, or Basques in those parts (there may have been Basques, but if that's the case this weirdness truly knows no bounds). When the Conquistadors finally made it back home they called shellfish "mariscos" after the Maricopa Indians of those same North American deserts because the Maricopas lived nowhere near the sea (maybe). "Orso" (bear in Latin) becoming "horse" is even more than a maybe (though the "everything-as-animal" metaphor generally begins by liberating and ends by eating it's own tail. To paraphrase a Reis Van Von Der Donk parable, when young Dancing Rock asked Chief Cunning Fox if he could name his wolf cub after him, Mother Angry Clouds rolled in but refused to rain). So whether English speaking Newyorkers will ever go the way of Spanglish speaking Nuyoricans is unpredictable. For all history has taught us, it could just as likely become us as the sole speakers of English left in this world, even if the only English thing remaining about the language we speak is its name, English.

So I hope it's clear what separates the Vox Super Voltus from any other urban dictionary then. First, "urban" doesn't fit us. Maternity wards for words don't exist on boulevards and avenues alone; roads, trails, cul de sacs, and interstates birth words of equal grandeur as well (notably, I learned "wigneck" at a gas station about 20 miles inland from Tampa. To get to "wigneck" one must first contract "white" + "nigger" to "wigger", and then further contract "wigger" + "redneck" -- and yes, these breeds exist in Florida sticks). In fact, "Savage" things initially came from the Late Latin woods, the silvaticus, not the streets at all; the streets may have been vulgar, but not necessarily savage. Secondly, urban dictionaries are petitions of new words either vying for validity or already so common conservatives are levying for their extraction. The Vox Super Voltus coasts above that war. If a word is said, it is. There are a few rare moments in this collection where you will hear us arguing against the existence of certain words, please read between the lines, this is just us having fun with polemics. All words are. So the purpose of the VSV is not just to document some existent words we like, but also to present words in a manner that strengthens our polyamorous philology of letting them all in.

Let them in, it's time -- both epochally and since I'm assuming you, reader, have passed most of your self identity milestones and are now deep into the deconstruction process. Linguists place two major age markers on learning new languages, before 5 and after 12. Before 5 is the golden period, the neurons are ripe and still ripped wide open. They say after 12 means you may never lose that accent (even Einstein couldn’t rout his), the neurons are settling into their ways. However, when I look at these age markers and think about my own experience learning languages (including the ever ongoing one with my mother tongue English) something else leaps out; 5 and 12 are two of the most important periods in creating one's self image. At 5 most children begin normal schooling and are hence blasted with the question "who am I" in relation to my peers. In creating our own identities we naturally build off the most salient things: sex, size, and what comes out of our mouths. If we kept skipping between languages it could threaten our new desperately congealing form. We are the sound we give off -- which brings us up to 12: puberty. By now you MUST know who you are and sound is even more important; tweens break into cliques according to which genre of music they listen to. Skipping between languages at this stage is downright ridiculable amongst those brutal peers. If the multi-lingual ball wasn't up and rolling before 12, you enter your freshman 101 language course refusing to morph with the new words and syntaxes; whether it's active or passive, this is one perilous time to be porous and amorphic. This is the real reason 4 years of high school language courses generally go in one ear and out the other; the teen is firming his identity up, not loosening it.

But all is not lost, my friends! If you have half a soul, all this shape building flying in the face of things not adding up (for me it was the “Save the Dolphins” but kill the tuna campaign hitting me on the same day I found out Regis Philbin and Seal were tennis buddies when it...) eventually turns in on itself and you look for any way to humpty-dumpty yourself off of that wall and laugh at all the king’s horses’ and all the king’s men’s scrambling to reconstruct your identity. Now, assuming you are at least out of high school reader, the dismantling of your identity becomes the ride; the nonsense has finally permeated permanent holes and your job best be to work with it or suffer your own antiquation. This is all to say there is a third great time to skip amongst the languages.

That time is NOW. Dismantle yourself. Dismantle your language. Immolate and party.

Don’t worry about whether this is a moment for “which” or “that” unless you like worrying about whether this is a moment for “which” or “that” (like I do). Spend some time pondering the legality of using words like “data” and “stamina” to represent the singular only if you accept that the use of the proper “datum” and “staminum“ for singular are justifiable conversation killers to 98% of the population (and be wary that the other 2%, of which I am part of, will want to bone your brains out). Shrink away from using the more forceful and acute yet unaccepted “for all intensive purposes” while opting instead for the redundant but accepted “for all intents and purposes” only if you’re not in the mood to rock any boats. But as to whether any of the aforementioned word choices could obscure or mar the point you’re trying to communicate: doubtful. In fact, sing the praise of redundancy if you need to! The word alone is fantastic; the “unda” comes from the Latin for “wave”. Re-wave that shit if you need to! Who said the goal is to always be precise? Who said the goal is to always be economic with your words? Maybe you wanna stretch it out but you don’t wanna say anything new. Maybe you are highly attuned to rhythm and beauty and your sentence needed a few extra sounds and syllables but no new ideas. Take these two examples: “Last night I got destroyed” vs. “Last night I got com-ple-te-ly destroyed”. To be destroyed is already something complete; completely destroyed is redundant, but man I’m telling you, last night I was com-ple-te-ly destroyed, got it? People are fickle with their personal longstanding issues and often need to be brow beaten and massaged with redundancy. Sometimes you need to slow the boulder down. Yeah, heed the grim lessons of my dense and slim editions, dear readers! Don’t be me! I write my books streamlined and small so you can take them with you and engage with the world while you’re engaging with words. When someone doesn’t get what I’m getting at I tell them ,“read it again”. Don’t do that! Be redundant and egoistic and keep us reading your words for longer than we should need to if it’s success you seek.

Wait, let’s slow down. Let me take my own advice, which in this case means qualifying and dampening my last bit of advice. One of the most incredible and counter-intuitive characteristics of the English language is that it is one of the least wordy, least redundant languages. Speakers of English of course always have the option of speaking redundantly, but the language itself comes sleek. Entertain me with a bit of folk science, take any book initially written in English and place it next to a translation of that same book, a translation into any language, and the version in English is nearly always shorter than the other version. It takes other languages more words to say the same thing English can in less. How can this be? How can a lawless and savage language like English be more economically efficient than refined, guided, and carefully monitored languages of the Old World? The answer is simple: the more rules one creates the more ways around the rules one creates. English, having fewer strict rules than its siblings, need not waste words a) making sure its way from x to y is legal and b) when it finds out the path it needs to take from x to y is in fact illegal, wasting more words taking the ‘round about route. Let’s take an extreme example: when the Lenape chief says, “before white man we had no words for ’trash’ or ’mine’ in any branch of Algonquin” you should say “sucks for you because it must have taken you pages to get the same point across we drive home in a single word”.

Ok, now I may be abusing my own advice, but I need to further qualify it and in doing so we need to revisit the “wave” in redundancy again. As English continues to expand there will come a time when we need to reel it in. Though clarity may not always be the goal, clarity must always be the option. There can be no joy or merit in playing with ambiguity if ambiguity is the rule. Language is first and foremost about communication. As English continues to bloat and blanket and one speaker of English will no longer understand another speaker of English, an umbrella “standard” English will have to be formed in order for the different subsets beneath to be continue understanding each other while maintaining their own dialects. In fact, the official bodies that monitor and guide other languages have come about for this very reason: if there were no “French language” there would be no chance in hell mother tongue francophonic speakers from the Congo, Marseille, and Paris could understand each other. To put it in more concrete terms for mother tongue English speakers, there are just barely enough rules currently in place in English for someone from Kansas and Scotland, for all intensive purposes, to understand each other, but that relationship is slipping fast. So though the fastidious talk of English purists arguing and whining for constraints (and what’s weirder, taking it personally) may sound like the preacher with his flock in the bunker preparing for Armageddon, we all know the preacher is ultimately right: Armageddon will come, just not tomorrow. When it does come, for all we know about those “waves”, it may very well be an ancient language like French bubbling up and bursting out of its self-imposed and once needed constraints.


Finally, as out of vogue fashions were once valid, all noise exists in the same state of flux. Letters this century sound different than they did the previous century. As time bends it bends sounds as well and Beethoven’s symphonies sounded different to him than they do to us now. Naturally this affects meanings of words from one decade to the next in subtle but crucial ways. Words need the flexibility to change in perpetuitum so their sounds can appropriately reflect the articles they currently highlight. As a suffix, the "Eng" of "English" therefore comes close enough to the "ing" of a gerund to reflect this motion: Amereng and Spañeng in particular sound like nouns in movement to me, Enging sounds like a super fast echo, and Slangeng sounds redundant. This is to say that verbs are not the only things conjugated, all words are conjugated by time. Or better, this is to say that all words are verbs ("oozing" may be a slow verb, but "chair" is an even slower verb). So let it not be forgotten that our tradiction itself is flux and therefore this collection, and all other collections that may call themselves "dictionaries", should be taken only as diaries.

You say, “Fantastic, Chris, we get your point, but why devote an entire book to words that are dubious at best?” The answer is because I am a patriot of the savage and free language, whatever that language may be, and in order for words themselves to remain free the forms they’re presented in must also remain soft and malleable. Language has afforded us so many forms by which to express ourselves: novels, poems, prose, articles, op-eds, essays, lyrics, facts, fictions, satires, et al -- but they are all still forms. I have no desire to eliminate the form, but I do think we need to keep them in check. We need to not only constantly revisit the simple question of “why this form”, but we also need to occasionally arbitrarily break it and taunt it to keep nimble. This brings us to the dictionary: what form is more defined than a definition? We have arrived at our target.

Now, with even more enthusiasm than I had when I began this introduction, I assert that this is an English collection until it tells me otherwise. And it will.

Yours,
Chris Leo

A

The Accidental Lutheran attempts a belief in everything but Faith. He believes in faucets, cues at the Post, the banality of discussing banality, indulgent habits, just hanging out, and barely fictive prose. In his belief/disbelief in all things he must eventually face the avoided question: does Faith get lumped in with the lot or does it remain separate? If he lumps it in he's forced to then admit it exists as a Lutheran does. If he keeps it separate, thereby designating it officially the only thing that does not exist (though technically anything that's debated must exist or what is it the debate is based on afterall?), he makes it as much a leap of Faith as all religion is and he's found Faith just as a Lutheran has.

-- Chris Leo


An accurator is one who arranges his truths artfully.

-- Chris Leo, Laura Marchetti


Adjucation is the unfortunate verb forced into fighting the stalemated battle of corralling Bourgeois away from their beloved adjectives and closer towards actual nouns. “Adjective” (think “trajective”) comes from the Latin adicere (“to throw near”) and comes from the palazzo not the piazza. An adjective is like something, but never is something. Amidst every culture from every era there is the peculiar pathology of princes believing that words of the previous century are superior and solely authentic to the current slang from the streets, despite all recurring historical evidence otherwise. This results in an upper class using more adjectives and a lower class using more nouns (since aging nouns ferment into airy adjectives). A noun, after all, is simply something that does something so consistently it becomes safe to give a name to the motion: a couch couches, a woman womans, a rock rocks. Once it becomes safe to name these actions, we think it then safe to use them as points of reference. The problem is, by the time they become referable they're also already at least partially (if undetectably) antiquated. A couch is now only couchlike, a woman womanate, a rock rockish, and even the adjectives supporting those nouns fall short-ish. To the cultural elite, everything must be “like” something because the only things the culturati experience nonvicariously are similes and betrayal. Holding themselves captive in their own castles comes with a price ascetics could argue (if we could only get those guys to argue!) outweighs their profits pulled in. To these elite, the men of the last century who created the nouns-cum-adjectives they prefer, having merely met these men through books, are only “like men” – making them as adjectivelike and therefore as vacuously valid as the words they prefer! An attempt to adjucate using modern examples is useless because the “well fine, but what is it like?” is often non cross-referenceable. “Not a problem,” the adjucation thinks, “I’ll just dip into my store of stories from any yesteryear they prefer to prove being here with us now is simply more here period”. But no, this winds up nowhere too. One would think the endless examples of Latin adjectives referring to Vulgate nouns (the “bovine” belly from the meal of “mucca” made by the maddened contadino who moved to NYC and became a “mook”) or ruling Norman English adjectives referring to English countryside nouns (like the sheep removed from the pasture that became mutton and the deer removed from the woods that became venison) would settle things, but it’s hopeless. If you try to adjucate that two of the most semi-fictive famous fornicators in English literature had semi-fictive names that reflected their fornication -- Lance-a-lot and Shakespeare ("wielder of spears") -- they spear their own eyes into your soul like a fundamentalist does into those of the deeply pitied. Nope, Adjucation always loses. Why? Why would a verb created to straighten out and tighten up other words fail at its rightful mission? -- Because the attitudes he advocates for are neither straight nor tight. It's looser with the fam than with the Man. Adjucation therefore operates more in accordance with the manners of his adversaries, while the real epigeals oggle the ass moving of the agile adjectives. Confused? We are too. River Plates itself, often caught between a noun and an adjective, may be in need of some aducation. For example, there's currently a moratorium in these offices on the "internet is not a street" debate because we just can't reach an agreement on which one is the noun and which one is the adjective.

“Actual” comes from the Latin "actualis" for “active.” Something that is actual is active. To "stare" in English means to fix your eyes upon something, but "stare" in Latin only meant to remain somewhere temporarily. Nouns are verbs nouns are verbs nouns are verbs, but there are those who believe and those who do not.

the adjunct of an adjective to education = when I dip you -- let go, when you twist -- I’ll stay fixed

-- Chris Leo


Adormable crushes with their foreman’s pudge and quart of ice cream built triceps might not be the best looking, but on cuteness alone they reap all the railing beautiful people work so hard for. Yes, a savage destruction of undergarments, bite marks, and blended sweat may not be in the cards for their romps, but after heavy cuddling matures to heavy petting they get in nonetheless – and no one ever calls them an asshole for it.

adorable + dormire (“to sleep” in Italian) = devouring cute



Altero is the combination of two synonyms to add a suplorious emphastress. In English, “extrawesomeness” and “malevilent” are two examples of alteros at either extreme. The most romantic altero though is bisogno, “a need” in formal Italian. When a sogno is a “dream” and bi is “two” what we literally have is the addition of two synonymous dreams therefore equaling desperately one need.

Altero itself is an altero and an eponym. Altero Giambpieretti opened two pizzerias in Bologna in 1953 and to this day has Italians considering him an inventor of the “quadrini”, which simply means he started cutting pizza in squares rather than triangles. His pizza is as quick as a franchise and as tasty as a mamma and papa. Altero is the combination of altro “other” + estero “other”, which is to say that his pizza is atmostratispheric. His logo reads “pizzAltero” which is yet another altero, for when both pizza and the Altero name already mean fantasmical, we are left feeling that bisogno.

-- Chris Leo


An Appology is sorry as sword, submissions through submissions, "you are lowly because I made you" type southpaws.

-- Chris Leo


The ascetic aesthetic is known in Italian as punkabestia ("punk with beast") because they wear dreadlocks and rottweilers like ladies on Madison Ave wear perms and poodles. They may read manifestos but when they protest they manifesta. Why/how? Because again the Italians nailed it. Their word for "weekdays" is "feriali" from the same root as "festival". However, their word for "weekend" is not therefore "fine feriali", party over -- it was "fine settimana", simply "end of the week", but it's now the very English sounding "weekend". They have infested the week thereby ensuring no weak ends, oh and that's to say that "sure" and "shore" also share the same root and the Italians have yet again nailed it.

-- Chris Leo


Aspirition is a phantom word that appears between other words. This word is not written with spy’s ink or encoded subliminally anywhere on the page. It is one’s own mental imposition into the blank space between words. Sometimes complete stories form between just two words, sometimes entire books only inspire one continuous nagging and haunting aspirition. Fascinatingly, quality of story has little or nothing to do with quality of aspiritions; an incredible story can be ghosted with trite aspiritions, whereas fluffy romances are often filled with enough visionary material to captivate the bar all night long without pricking a single suspicion that you’d bought your current book at a newspaper stand.

aspirate + apparition = a word between words that carries the word spirit between itself

-- Chris Leo


ATD, or fully Alex Trebek Dilemma, is the confusion of whether to say a foreign word correctly or to say it as those around you are saying it. Alex Trebek, Canadian host of the tv game show Jeopardy, has spawned many an American dinner debate over his non-Anglofication of foreign words. The curious linguistic pride that plagues all nations fosters a feeling in the gut that proper pronunciation is pretentious at best and possibly even downright traitorous, communist, Viet Congoese, or French. When Laura’s coworkers in Bologna ask her if she’ll join them for “branch” on Saturday she slyly avoids the ATD of whether to roll with the “branch” or be the only one saying “brunch” by offering River Plate’s “la prena” (see the "Italian Brunch" entry) discovery.

-- Chris Leo


Autorageous. I'm the kind of guy that. Because I'm like that, that's how I am. They know, when it comes to me it's a whole 'nother thing. I'm just like that, I can't stop. That's what I'm known for. If I was to cut back I wouldn't be me. They know, when it comes to me there aint no knowing.

-- Chris Leo


Azmuthologists are guided by stars. The problem is, not just one star, but every star. This makes guidance guaranteed, but concentration impossible. Some believe the name is derived from “azimuths”, from the Arabic as-sumt, which measure the distance from us to the stars. Other's claim it comes from Ozmythologists because their ways are just too peculiar. Others yet believe it’s a reference to the way these advanced ADHDed learn languages: they buy a foreign dictionary and begin with gusto at the beginning reading to the end of the ‘A’ entries, they then skip to the back for the ‘Z’ entries thinking they could work their way in reverse to keep things interesting, when they soon start to tire and feel like a balance is needed they shift to the ‘M’s, bore, and then move on to the next language leaving the rest of the book unleafed. When confronting a non-English speaking azmuthologist “Aye! Andiamo alle movies manana? Maybe zip around a metro meeting aphrodities and mayhem? Make a manifestation aveq an adhoc zoo at the marquee maggiore?” would work, and they’d respond with “Mostly!” Azmuthologists, so say the stars, make mean matches mit abecedinarians. .

-- Chris Leo

B

Basick is the idea that vox populi herd under a mass delusion of madness. Their affairs are more insane; when their theories and art do break from form they shatter minds; their religion is science-fictional; and their day-to-day life is more thrilling and bizarre than any novella the eccentric whittles away at in his progressive solitude. Extracting the lunacy may take some wading in the boredom of assumed conversational protocol, but when it comes it comes and it comes like this “y’know it’s like blah blah and this and that and that’s how it is” and it never sounded so clear, correct, economic, and demented.

-- Chris Leo


Beasting. Dilated alveoli relish in a hyenic cackle approaching histrionics and in turn drawing more air from same said hyenic histrionics the heavy panting in and out of every corpuscle like a chest-pounding ape exploding in bloom from a Bikram yoga stretch would as the first tinges of benz tickle but will never take my blood as I bite back and resurface in a roar that rids ever baobab beneath Kilimanjaro of their nesting flocks with a sack of Plath’s pathetic mushrooms of the sea faking the filter filter filtering in uniform on unipods like the aesthetically sterile masses of Shinjuku rushing home for hymen discharge drenched bukkaka hentai as the real unsifted (harbored?) aggravant festers in nacre for what? To rot away on the 67th floor of the 85th prefecture in the 6,782nd year of wasted seppuku and hidden pearls? Hell no, pried, displayed, and gallowed around my chick’s neck, and the rest of you? Filter your filter through mine savoring the curious pain of the irritant as it bloats my urethra back up to your strewn insecurities around my chicks neck and I pant and I pant and I pant until the beasting passes.

-- Chris Leo


Beatch, “bitch” (pronounced as they do in Europe, beetch) + “beach”, is a mirage personified.

-- Chris Leo


Binorario is the real reason Italian trains do not arrive on time. Think about where they're arriving from. When a conductor has to travel from sea to sea through mountains and snow in the middle, clocks get confused. When the villages and cities passed on said voyages have not only existed since before they birthed words like “village” and "city” themselves, but when these same villages are often stuck in any number of varying epochs, vortexes form while minutes nostalgically pause to watch where they’ve rested before. “Binario” is the Italian word for “train track” and something that’s “in orario” is on time, but scholars doubt this etymology of the word. Some think it comes from “bi” + “orario” for “a splitting of time” or “two times”. Others believe that notion is too Italian, that this word could have only come from outside eyes looking in. Italians aren’t bothered by, nor do they even notice, binorario because this splitting of time is something they all carry inside them. “Bin”, an English word for “trash can”, + “orario” is what these foreign eyes feel Italians have done to time. Italy was after all one of the last Mediterranean civilizations to adopt the clock, even while its empire was light years ahead in other realms. In fact, the word “train” even has us waiting for something. From the Latin “tragere” for “pull” it has us in front of it tugging, not behind it pushing and then running to catch up.

-- Chris Leo


Blazerds are burning patches of cheek scorched by freezing winds from blizzards. Freezers or il coldo (mixture of English "cold" and Italian "caldo" for "hot") are cold sweats brought on by fevers.

-- Chris Leo


Blind Update. How wonderful, I met Vanessa for dinner on the recommendation of mutual friends who pitied us both. Over the course of the meal I was freshed up on Noah the ex-boyfriend; Stephanie the nephew; Monica the boss; the glorious but tedious resume from Rainbows and Sunbeams daycare through Barnard undergrad through the internship at Cohen & Cohen and straight up until Monica again; the mother who worries; the brother the loveable fuck-up; and of course, Melanie the incautious best friend. I told her my eyes were red and glassy due to sulfite allergies from the wine. Turns out Jesse too gets allergies from wine! Not from Zinfandel or Petit Syrah though, only Cabernet and one other one. I put her in a cab and let my allergies turn into the tears they really wanted to be as soon as I checked my crotch to see what was happening and found the cowering turtle tucked agoraphobically deep into his shell. We’ll be home soon, we’ll be home soon pal. Once I could no longer make out which cab was hers I waved down Sixth Avenue to all of them. Ciao Vanessas, thanks for the update!

-- Chris Leo


Brutaful. Something which lacks the looks, but possesses the charm. Serge Gainsbourg was brutoful. Lil' Kim is brutaful. Though this word is essentially as low brow as the idea it expresses, it's an important inclusion to River Plates because it's part of the rare grouping of words that reflect the gender of their subjects from the middle. Beautron and beautrix are its official antonyms, but well reasoned fear that the aseptic staleness of these words is in fact another type of pathogen limits their use in popular speech.

-- Chris Leo


Buona serrate is a diss restricted strictly to Roman districts we should all start using. “Buona serata” means “have a good night” in Italian and “serrate” means “having notched edges like a saw to separate better”. Both words come from the same Proto-Indo-European root, ser “to cut”. The idea being that the night cuts the days apart from each other. “Saw” also comes from the same source. To “fare/tirare una sega” in Italian means to jerk off, literally to “make the saw”. Therefore, “buona serrate” is a way of saying “go fuck yourself” that leaves the dissed asking "wait, did he just say..?" if you wanted to leave something lingering to fester later. There’s a future temporary friendship happening here. In colloquial Newyorkese, “up in this cut” means “something happening tonight” but anything more than an intuitive link River Plates finds doubtful.

nacht, notte, night = nitch, notch, niche = cuts cuts cuts

-- Chris Leo

C

Cadwalk. "Catwalk" may have been a word New York exported to the world, but it was also good intuition for Laura to assume that we failed to import the sound of the ancient T in the middle. Generally, Newyorkese beats the spine out of that letter. It breaks it down to a soft d {think about what happened to the "sat" from "satisfaction": when it got everything it wanted (from the Latin satis, "enough, sufficient") it fell flat and became "sad". In both sound and history, sad quite literally sat}. So when one destroyed Sunday morning she said, "Chris, I'm just not ready yet to face that cadwalk on Smith street" one has to understand my response of "Really? You think the men in this neighborhood have better fashion sense than the women?" Once I finally got her out of the house it was time for my hair of the dog. I tried every rationale I could think of to get her to agree. When my reasoning failed I even suggested I'd be able to find more suitable reasons once I got that first nip in me. "You really are some sort of cadfly, aren't you mon amour?" To which again, I did not find correctable. In fact, by now I was in the swing of this and (after that nip) I returned fire with, "So now I'm finally ready to go back home and show you that cadget of mine."
"Scusa?"
"Y'know, the one I got from Old Norse? The one that once meant "nail, spike?"
"Cazzo!"

cad + catwalk = cadwalk

-- Chris Leo


Cattivated by her scheming ways I couldn’t peel myself away though her tricks were transparent and her deceit embarrassingly blatant. It’s amazing these women think men can’t recognize the face of evil when it wrings its wicked ways. How much more upsetting is it though that we succumb to them none the less, if even for fleeting moments? “Meet me for coffee in Gramercy now, you’re buying” was all the message read and all it took to have me peddling as fast as I could to get there before some other douche assumed my empty throne. “Why does your friend Matt only like ugly girls?” was how the conversation began and yet I sat there still through the wearisome and expensive tea she sipped while divining the means by which she'd off her competition according to the settling of the leaves at the bottom of the mug. You’d think such a cunning beast would be less careless than to leak the information so early on that there wasn’t even any tail in this for me, but not only did I sit there still, I covered the bill.

cattiva (“bad” in Italian) + “captivate” = the numbing venom of diabolism

-- Chris Leo


Cenalty is a penalty incurred from the breaching of table etiquette. Conveniently coincidental, "cena" in Italian means "dinner" while "cena" in Old Slavic means "honor". Phonetically the same, "chain" in English reflects the aversion many people feel towards the shackled trappings of table culture. When the pancha's parked beneath the plate it's human nature to create a counter balance to the ingestions with repulsions (often irate) heading in reverse out the same pipe. Uns is what happened to nos when it crossed the Alps. Before it did, the Romans called the table "mensa", which doubled as the high and mighty "alter top". But alas, when Cesar crossed the Rubicon the temples kept toppling. Soon "mensa" was replaced with "table" (a word that comes from Umbria, below the Rubicon) and the cenobile will forever remain pondering the implications of our (uns, nos) unstable table.

When a table is full with food it is "la tavola" in Italian, when it's empty it's "il tavolo". "Kenos" is Greek for "empty" and therefore the worst cenalty imaginable is one table clearing cenolty. Another word that came from "Kenos" is our English "cage" which brings this whole discussion full circle: when the customs that once made a culture so strong become rules rather than choices we find ourselves confined by refinement.

-- Chris Leo


Cereblown. One celestial (Ceres, dwarf planet), goddess given (Ceres, Roman goddess of growth and motherly love) mind-blowing (cerebellum, which comes pre-reciped for the explosion: "cere", from Proto Indo European "ker" forms the root of nearly every word we use + "bellum" as the Latin word for "war" that naturally results when one adds together nearly every word we use). A cerebro as an infinitely inspiring best friend. Conversations with cerebros begin with "No way bro!" and end with "No way bro!"

-- Chris Leo


Chezy comes from French colonial Ponticherry and was the once ailing sibling of British India's "cheezy", having both been birthed from the Urdo chiz for "a thing", until it's recent revival. By the time "chiz" made it back to England it meant "a big thing" and therefore "showy", from whence we get the modern meaning of "cheezy". Remnants of transitory ideas can still be found in the idiom "the big cheese" (a self-inflated V.I.P.) and the name "Tyrone" ("big cheese" in Greek). One would think though that the French "chez", which already denotes something usually large, should have taken root before the British version of the Urdu word (think about how the German word for cheese, "kase", already sounds like the Latin word for house "casa" that eventually became "chez" in France), but it was the concept in general the French had difficulty with. Chezy lingered in limbo for a hundred years, kept alive by only the occasional chimerical humorist, until the commodifiction of Ernesto "Che" Guevara cleared a parting in the woods. Through four continents and four languages, operating clandestinely as the guerilla Guevara himself, chezy finally found its coup. "Yeah it's true that dreadlocks on white people go hand in hand with chezy red manifestations on dormitory walls, but I'm expecting Johan's misplaced enthusiasm to mature into the gung-ho ability to make millions after graduation. If only I can wait these drum circles out I'm sure I'll strike gold."

Che + queso = que cheso! Fauxmage ("fake cheese")will be the French equivalent when the concept congeals.

-- Chris Leo


Chibby has relatives in every language, yet it's still a concept women have difficulty grasping. In Spain, morbosa is the twisted desire for something supinely and slatternly supple. Gordita is its Colombian relative. Porcine, "poor" + "cino" (Italian for "Chinese"), is a Newyorkese reappropriation of "swinelike" to describe Asian breasts raised on American carbs and steroid injected meats. Una peligrasa, is a dangerously (peligroso) fat (grasa) Dominicana the average Jack Sprat might think twice before hitting. La coltoletta In Italian, "knife" (coltello) + "cutlet" (cotoletta) is chibby's coincidental calque. La fettunta (a "greasy piece" in Tuscan)is closest to gordita. In Scottish a "chib" is a filthy little oft homemade knife and "chubby" is generally the form of the body below the sharp tongue that begins its jabbings after several stouts when you just came in peace, hence "I don't know what it is about that chibby thing hugging the bar, she seems to hate me but I just can't get enough." If the bloating falls on the side of the aggressor instead or as well, it is very likely that someone got chibbed last night.

"chib" (a knife) + "chubby" = the possessive lusting to become a male praying mantis

-- Chris Leo


Clusterphobia. Dan, Mary, Matt, yes. Susan, Sheila, Kevin, Matt, yes too. Susan, Dan, Kevin, Rachel, Mark, Franklin, Ok. Dan, Mary, Matt, Susan, Kevin, Rachel, Mark, Sheila, Franklin, Nicola, no way. One can't taste the fontina through the cinque formaggio. Fitzgerald, the king of the party believed 12 was the magic number. "Cugnamento" is a Marchigiano term for large social groups inability to squeeze through a door, and hence the party lingers awkwardly in the doorway for several hours until dissipation in defeat, night dead.

-- Chris Leo, Marcellus Hall


A complament is both a diss and compliment dished at once, a compliment con lamentations. “You really are some guinea aren’t you? Will I ever see you without some of mamma’s sauce or some other stained right next to that dirty swatch of grease you can’t seem to get out of that guinea-t from that old Fiat you're always fixin' on that big fat gunt of yours? What? you eatin' while you're fixin' you guinea you?" also means “you lead the good life that close to the ground.” Related to but different from the German compliment that hits as bluntly as only children and retards are supposed to, “Your last band was very good. A bit trendy and not quite excellent, but very very good. You’re new band, not so much.”

-- Chris Leo


When a claim of coñosseur accidentally slips dentally from its safeguarding mentally, it autophages itself into an abetting that abeds only the loser da solo into the star position; good thing the pizza stained consolation humiliations remain till morning to remind you of hubris’ ever overarching. Keep that shit tight, holmes. All your cred curdles if you let it tumble out. A well placed faux fumble though? That’s another thing entirely. Tell your Latina in English you’re a coñosseur of all the finer things, blush when she blushes, follow it with a "what?", and we just might be talking.

“connoisseur” comes from the Latin “cognoscere”, “to know”, but the only thing certain about the Spanish “el coño”, “pussy”, is that no one knows nothin’ about it and those that do, like our coñosseur, aren't talking. In my story “Gran Raccordo Annulare, You Spin Me Right ‘Round” in “Feathers Like Leather” I suggest it was an Aragon import following the conquest of Southern Italy. "l'icona" is "icon" in proper Italian, but in Sicilian it's "la cona"; somewhere inbetween the two (with a little help from metathesis and then the further telephone game transfer from Catalan to Castilian) is it such a leap to imagine "il cona" becoming "el coño"? The Pussy as The Icon. However, "il cogno" is a Latin measurement for oil, making "how much oil can your thing take? Shall I lend you my dip stick?" another fantastic candidate. But then the Spanish have also been known to squeeze Latin words short (i.e. "settimana" to "semana") making the argument that "el coño" comes from "il cognato" (now meaning "brother-in-law", it stemmed originally from the Latin “cum nato”, "from birth", think “cognate” -- making the pussy the place we come from) yet another valid possibility – but don’t bother with this mess unless you’re looking for the recipe to getting lost or sleeping alone. “Hysterikos” was a fervent attack of the womb in ancient Greek and “hysterical” has since come to mean something similar, but inbetween there and here the Latin “hystericus” was so much more accepting. Being simply a state of the womb, it carried no tone. This is 101evident to the coñosseur who lets it slide, casually wombing with the wombly.

-- Chris Leo


Consolidate. Counselor led me astray, the council concocted reasons to debate the ish for days, there are 300 channels on my cable console but not a drop to drink, and certainly there's no solace to be found in the way the constable thinks, lots of things to keep me busy but with very little sense: a palm tree, a beach, a cocktail and a peach, condense.

con + sole + date = bring it back in, set a date with the sun

-- Chris Leo


Creatative is an idea for those who envision creation and imitation solely as valves for novelty with different shaped nozzles; the former guzzles while the latter’s a muzzle, but they both give it shape. I invite those who don't see things this way to imitate an imitator or translate a book back into its original language and report back on the end result. Creations survey novelty in macro while the approximations of imitations de facto disclose novelty on the micro; in between, the creatative piece strikes a harmonious balance. The Beatles “Rubber Soul” is a creatative masterpiece. For the gamut of understandable reasons, when black American musicians of the 60’s criticized white musicians as plagiarists they’d call them “plastic soul”. When after five albums the Beatles began (openly) venturing away from these alleged synthetic roots, it was apt brilliance to name that initial album “Rubber Soul”. And ever consistent with creatativeness, “Rubber Soul” may be one of the greatest selling albums of all time, but it never had a number one hit. Poser is creatative's Mercian relative. Like poseur pronounced sans accent, a poser poses a question in his approach at imitation: is this or is this not something new?

creatative = only material goods are actually thievable

-- Chris Leo

D

Debellish. When I collapsed next to her sparkling languid frame I called upon Shelley and Coleridge and Ovid and Virgil and O’hara and Miller and Penthouse Forum and every French film I saw growing up to get something back to you and…and…every line I composed simply debellished the beauty at hand. Nope, this one was for me and me alone, my friends. My words could do it no justice. No, no mortal soul could relay that info back without the transfer suffering brutally from flawed debellishments. However, when word finally leaked to Veronica and I was subjected to answer that question amidst the assault, “Was it fun!? Well I hope you at least had fun, you scumbag!” how blessed I was to have debellishments and all the lackings that come with them on my side, “No, no, please, Jeez, it really wasn’t. I hated every minute of it.”

-- Chris Leo


Desceltic or (di)celcian words are proud and free. They refuse all constraints of icons, phonetics, and borders, yet one way or another their point is always clear. Like shadows that move with stealth from one object to the next, Herodotus believed they came from caves. Like galleys, galleasses, gales, and the bile from the gall, they are both fluid like wind and calloused by toughened skin. When they are runes on rocks in Cork they are Keltic. When they are drunks and goons in Boston they are Seltic. When they are Milanese secessionists who draw their lineage ultimately from Czech they are Cheltic. When they were Keltoi in Greece they used another alphabet entirely. The Mandarin name for China is even Wade-Giles, like Wales-Gael. Like Smurfs they smurf smurfingly. They may conspire ("with spirits")at one moment, then turn and conspire ("against the steeple")the next, returning "Eiffel" to "I fell" and abscond on schooners like scoundrel pirates. And speaking of Pirates, Christopher Colombus' boat the Santa Maria was originally named the Gallega yet no one called it that. The Vulgate Bible misprinted certe ("certain, forever") as celte and it stuck. They knew. Though they are of one blood, they are from Gaul, Gall, Gael, Galatia, Gaia, Galicia, and Portugal and once spoke some form of Gaelic or Goidelic. When they gallivant in Paris they smoke Gauloise. The sound galno itself once meant “strong” in all of these hamlets, yet the word gall also meant "stranger" in all the same households -- yes, all those words are related. If it can be agreed that words mutate fastest on streets and ports, then it’s also worth noting that the Spanish word for “street”, calle, comes from Callaeci, the ancient Celts of the port that became Porto. These stubborn words have gall.

Diselltious often comes from the Italian “scegliere” which means “to decide” which when then translated back to Latin means “cut off” which when then translated back to English any wise soul should interpret as “stay out of it, this word remains savage, protean, and ubiquitous”.

"Goccia" is Italian for a "drop" and may have come from "Galicia" or the Portuguese Indian colony in Goa or both. In Galicia a drop is a "morriña" which is also their word for "saudade", the longing for something distant and unattainable. It's roots are said to lie in the missed feeling sailors experienced after returning home during the age of the great Portuguese discoveries. Not officially all out tears, but a few melancholic drops. These dicelcian words even move away from themselves.

-- Chris Leo


Dethrowned reigns leisurely at both the peak and valley of the bell curve, yet it can never be dethroned. In Hunter S. Thompson’s The Rum Diaries a young reporter takes a job in San Juan to write an editorial on why so many Puerto Ricans leave the tropics for NYC. Puerto Ricans, having the world's most priveledged duplicitous status of neither sovereignty nor statehood, neither Latinos nor gringos, have chosen only one other exclave as their own, New York City. One Million Puerto Ricans live in New York. Why? Should we not pay attention to the choices of a people graced with a wisdom that comes with such a sweet situation? Why New York then when they could just stay on their better beach and kick it? By the book’s end the only answer Thompson comes up with is “want” -- but if only he went bike riding with me that day last summer when outside of George Washington High in Washington Heights at the northern tip of Manhattan I stopped the dirty ice cart to grab a cup of tamarindo and the perfect Puertoricana who learned something in 17 years women on Madison Ave never learn in 70, that nothing looks hotter than tight jeans and a wife beater in July, asked me what I was doing in the barrio, Thompson may have arrived at a slightly different conclusion and we may therefore have never received The Rum Diaries. I told her I was “fuggin’ diggin’ the fact that between the GW Bridge and GW High in GW Heights our man GW got what he wanted on the same piece of land he was once defeated: nobody speaking the Queen’s English in his rebel state. You know, he was hoping it would be German or French we spoke. If you had told him then it was gonna be Spanish!…shit. So after this I’ll ride back downtown, try and write something smart about it, sell it, and go buy a margarita with my hypothocized earnings, you?” To which she replied, “…White guys, why you always trying to make something of yourselves?” To which, as defeated as Washington once was on this very street corner, I then hopped back on my bike consumed like a skipping record trying to think of a rebuttal for that crafty cunt all the way from Washington Heights to the Gowanus. Upon arrival at home I couldn’t write that smart essay I had hoped to. Upon margarita to my lips I could not put the needle back into the groove. Eventually the breaking rebroke when I looked at my skinny man’s pancha caused by necessary margaritas to keep me in this party I'm always trying to leave and coughed up soot I ingested while trying to get healthy and productive and I got my answer: time to move to Italy and plant my feet. A "throne" began in Proto-Indo-European as “to hold firm”, yet something which is "thrown" is not held firmly at all. An ascent up the social ladder is generally seen as a good thing, but when it comes at the expense of your accent, when every cent gained is but a seed for a more reputable nascent grade, and every July sunset is not spent with your family, cousins, and friends outdoors in the best city in the world, it is proof that your long questions should start coming in shorter sentences. She dethrowned me.

dethrowned = relax, wait here and it will come...that is, if you're waiting for it at all. But still, so why New York? If waiting nets the same results moving does, and Puerto Ricans can see things others can't, then what better place to wait than a city where everyone's moving? Don't mix moods though, dethrowning Puerto Ricans does not make them deseatful. On the contray, it is the anxious deseated mover and shaker who's more likely up to some form of deceit or another.

-- Chris Leo


dissert, from the Latin dis "apart" + the French servir to "serve", is one dessert with two spoons for one couple, which is most likely similar to the original dessert which meant "to clear the table", to "deserve". There's an easy rule to follow with new words: if it doesn't sound like the word it represents it is not a new word. "de-serve"Therefore, be careful not to dissect dissert, keep it beautiful, don't desert the goal. Or, if that poses a problem but the old word's grown as stale as a desert and you're looking for something new, try mixing Italian with Italian for "the true dessert," dulcerto (dulce for "sweet" + certo for "correct"). Just be sure to make no room for impostres (im for "not" + the Spanish postres for "dessert" = things like pizzert), or have we already disserted (think dissertation) on the topic at length.

-- Chris Leo


Divisionary verbs are auxiliary verbs that once supported primary verbs using “have” but now use “of”. They are semi-realized prodigals whose future evolution is obvious though the elder and middle stages are still the only versions in use. “Should have gone”, “might have known”, “could have taken” have become “should of gone”, “might of known”, “could of taken.” “Should of gone” literally means “the should part of gone” as if every verb already holds all possibilities within them. There is a should part of gone, a might part of gone, a could, would, am, was, has, and possibly even a got part already integral to “gone”. Basic verbs (be, give, have, take, keep, etc) being the most ancient verbs means relentless usage through the ages has exposed them to more mutable elements than newer verbs. In every language these verbs are never regular and therefore neither are the sentences and idioms they operate within. Though without fail the mutations of the basic verbs are gorgeous and playful, there’s an ebb and flow that in English is currently drawing them in to a gradual and temporal unirregulation (which is never quite a reregulation, but just a pull back in rather than a push out). Soon these divisionary verbs will close the bridge between the verbs they support thereby antiquating the main verbs while assuming positions of verbs proper themselves. Shouldgone, couldgone, wouldgone, and gotgone etc will solidify their previous slices of the “gone” pie into autonomous actions. Pioneering paths idioms like “how (does it) come?”, “what (does it) gives?”, “I (have) never (heard or anything like that)!” take are referencable for insight into the future evolution of these divisionary verbs before they push back out again.

-- Chris Leo


Downstate is not a word. Crack open the frizzy chiznazz and celebrate with River Plates because it is one rare decade indeed when you'll finally here us say, "no." There is the south, down south, down there, lowlands, meridianale, extremadura, and the rainbow of other colorful words we romanticize all things "south" with (the best of course being "Upper Egypt"), but downstate? No. Put downstate in the same skinny folder with mainlining heroin and studying yoga with the sole goal of autofellatio: things not to do. Please, we will rarely ask you to draw a line. Here, draw a line.

-- Chris Leo


Drawer in linguistics is an historical back-formation. An historical back-formation is a back-formation that continues to dig deeper and deeper into the past rather than plow ahead into the future in search of its lost soul. In this case, a drawer is someone who necessarily betrayed someone so the story could progress, or so he’s rewritten. Without betrayal and treason the plot can not curve, he pleads. We need him, the letch whines. Naturally, a drawer feels like a traitor and a traitor feels like a piece of churned mud. What to do then to appease your inner peace while the masses about loathe you, you traitor, you traducer, you plotter! Ration it out. Find the root of the reason for your t-reasoning ("t" as a symbol of the Cross) and reduce. Benedict Arnold hands it over to the crowd, “You tell me! You tell me! Why then did I do it? What drives a traitor to be a traitor?” “Traitor”, he argues, comes from the same source as “tract”, “trattoria”, and even “dates” and “tradition” as well as “traducer”, “plotter”, and “dare”. From the Latin “tradere” (“to hand over, to draw out”) do we not kill the fruits of the earth so that we can survive and our story grow? Do we not betray with every full tray served? Is to serve not therefore to survive? In French a traître is a caterer. The drawer keeps going back in his quest for absolution, to the Holy Lands and the Coptic Bible! There would be no resurrection without the most selfless of all saints, Judas Iscariot. Forget not that the “jew” sound of both Judas and Jesus is from the beginning of the almighty Yahweh. Of course the dip (from Old English dyppan, “to baptize”) into the hummus (“earth, clay, mud” out of which He molded us in His likeness) happened amongst trays. What a different course history would have taken if Jesus called himself a "Coward of Men" (as a British surname, from "cow herder") rather than a "Shepherd of Men" (from "sheep herder")! The very sound are, the English verb “to be”, in Proto-Indo-European initially meant “to plow”. The drawer, poor guy, therefore simply drew the shortest straw; and “straw” of course comes from the Proto-Indo-European stere, “to spread”, to help our story spread. And the drawer's draws, poor guy, are also often as muddied as this field tilled.
i.e. “Oh man, this thing was starting to write itself -- boh-ring --I had to be the drawer so we could get to the next episode.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t follow.”
“Oh well I just figured, fine, I’d be the scapegoat and rat you out to Sylvia so this thing could progress y’know? No one else had the balls to be the bad guy for the sake of movement. The ease at which you fibbed was losing its excitement to all of us, man? So for the sake of everyone I drew, I drew man, you get it now, no?”

-- Chris Leo


Drungry, a relative of hangry, comes from Dubai and refers not only to the mysterious equation that colories from alcohol create a need for complimentary calories from food after, but also to the type of late night/early morning cuisine you might find to satiate said need: "A'ight, I'd like some aloo motor drungry and my sister would like a bowl of whatever it is you got stewing down there in the drungry."

Folk etymoligists may try and tell you that "the drungry" was the lowest hold on pirate ships of the Arabian Sea where they kept their contraband hidden, but when the need actually hits, anyone living through it can assure you that the history of this word is much more direct.

drunk + hungry = drungry

(for more information on the current baby boom of words from Dubai, we recommend anotherfashionblog.blogspot.com)
-- Chris Leo


Dustriousness is a poster child for back-formations. A back-formation happens when a new word is formed by shortening a longer word when integral syllables mistaken for affixes are removed. The most confusingly disastrous back-formation occured when Prudence raced so hastely through a "below-job" it never grew bigger than "blow job" again. In this case the logic went: if a busy person is industrious then the opposite would be formed by simply removing the negating "in". When the new word looks like "something which collects dust" you light one up, call your assumption a fact, and kick back all dustriuoslike.

industrious - in = lazy lazy lazy

-- Chris Leo

E

Well your choices are either eavesmocking or risking an insta-friending-joint-brunch with your temporary neighbors when restos put their tables so close together to conjure up that contrived convivial rustico vibe, so no, honestly no it was not a lazy smugness that slipped me into my haughty dissection of our neighbors' blurred-by-burberry beer and con queso bods; speaking in Italian quasi-code with Laura was a calculated defense to keep their brunch theirs and our brunch ours. But I wonder what word it was that gave us away? Maybe "Porco Slope" wasn't cloaked (and certainly not witty) enough? Or maybe "Ma per favore! Devano parlare sempre di Brian Lehrer? Ancora a brunch?" needs no translator. Either way, at something I said they clamped up, finishing their florentine's in silence which in turn had me in a frantic flurry yapping away out of guilt, attempting to backpedal like nothing I said had anything to do with anyone anywhere near anything brunchy. I became a caricature of myself fueling them with more and more eavesmockery, loading them up with all sorts of exaggerated infamation (infamy + information), as I tried harder and harder to dig myself out of the embarassment of being busted for my own eavesmockery.

-- Marcellus Hall, Chris Leo


ETA, pronounced aytah, is the explosive combination of “estimated time of arrival” and “Euskadi Ta Askatasuna”, the violent Basque liberation front. It is the opposite of what Dr. Phil calls a “safe landing”. For example, when Gary received the mysterious text message reporting “your girlfriend knows” his eyes darted first to the open bottle of tequila, then to the blond hair stuck to a pillow in a house that generally only sheds brown, then to the clock to see “what the ETA was” until “she” returned from work and the bomb dropped, then back to the empty bottle of tequila.

ETA = liberation yes, but at what bloody cost? To be turned into an eta (Japanese for "one who does not exist")?

-- Chris Leo


An ewreckted structure’s raising calls for razing. “The ewrecktion of that new hotel obliterated my beautiful view of the Queensboro Bridge” complained the young profesh to the ancient local. “Yeah well the ewerecktion of that Queensboro Bridge ruined my beautiful view of the river,” and Robert Moses and a Lenapi laughed together in their graves.

-- Chris Leo


Expensive (v.). My strolling map of New York is a tangle of twists and turns that I've poeticized to Laura meanders non-linearly due to my romantic whimsy, while the truth is I've actually strategically plotted out an avoidance of every shoe store along the route because she tends to be expensive.

ex (Latin "out of") + pensare (Latin "consider") = pense that thought right out

-- Chris Leo

F

Farfalling is the only way to drop. If the far falling is imminent and you've been crawling on 1,000 feet your whole life and suddenly you wake up instead with wings you don't know how to use and but a few weeks left to live, the only option is to get drunk on exsquisite nectar, lay some eggs, make a child happy and young lover's blush, and flutter with and then against the wind all the way down down down.

"farfalling" comes to us from the Italian word for "butterfly", "farfalla."

(For more poesie on entomology etymology I highly recommend http://www.insects.org/ced4/etymology.html which will have you thinking of caterpillars as chatepelose which translates to "hairy cats" in French even though the French call them chenille for "little dogs".)
-- Chris Leo


Fiasco. This isn't so much a new word as it is a correction I refuse to make when Laura asks, "Chris, did you pack the fiasco?"
"Always babe, always."

Proving yet again that they know things, "fiasco" in Italian is both a flask and a fiasco proper. In accordance with flasks and fiascos both generally bringing about weird lapses of memory, "fiasco" is a word that went the rare direction of Germany ("flasche") to Italy and then up to us, arriving in England several hundred years after "flask" was already in use. "Flush" redness of the face shares the same root. From the chemical reaction that occurs when alcohol from a flask sends blood to the extremities or from the embarrassement that hits you in a flash the morning after a fiasco?

-- Chris Leo


Forange is one way at falsifying false friends. “Straniero” and its weird relatives in most Latin based languages simply means “foreigner”, not “strange.” "Forange" minces no thoughts: you’re not from here, you’re a creep. Erudites, poets, and testy Catalans have argued that "forange" is in fact a dialectal slur of "Falange", the old fascist party of Spain, while the rest of us know there is a world beyond Franco's dominion ripe and ready with political romance not simply limited to Iberia or Hemmingway -- not that this word has anything to do with romance (unless the opposing force of romance is also considered part and parcel). During an Anglo-American debate on who "Asians" techincally are, Chinese or Indians, a local was overheard saying, "why can't we just call all these forangers Chindians?" Forench is the alienation a Parisian experiences in his own city, where even at the top of Montmarte it's common to feel a longing for the Paris missed. The game is to then locate the Eiffel Tower (easy) and create an internal dialogue with the foreigner atop also seeking Paris: "You are looking for Paris from there, I am looking from here, and yet neither one of us can quite secure it." This is not to be confused with a Greek Gringo. A Forenchy is archetypically French, whereas a Greek Gringo is a tourist even amongst tourists. Greek Gringo is a combination of synonyms for bombastic effect: "It's all Greek to me" for "unintelligible speech" + "gringo" which comes from "griego" which means "Greek" in Spanish which means "unitelligible speech" = t-shirts that signify where you've been, or worse, where you are. Worth noting, The Spaniards nicknamed the Cretian painter Doménikos Theotokópoulos the Italian "El Greco" rather than their own "El Griego" because he studied and lived in Venice and Rome before moving to Toledo; apparently "Greek", like "tourist", is one very verby noun. Also worth noting, "Grig" is an antiquated British word for a light and lively person. One was often "merry as a grig" which also came from "Greek" which oddly enough also meant "grasshopper" and through transmutations not only leaves us with "Jiminy Cricket" but brings us back close to "Greek" -- a cricket is "grillo" in Italian. This is getting weird so back to beard: Bizeard, "bizzare" + "beard", is another word that combined synonyms to add stress to the barbaric impression left by foreigners. In Cockney slang a beard is called a "strange and weird" but the word beard already encompasses both ideas. "Beard" comes form the Basque "bizar" (English only takes the bizarre words from the bizarre people) and "barbarian" comes from the Latin "barba" for "beard". In Maine, where it is common for most men to have beards, a very large beard is called a "beared", as in "someone who has turned into a bear". Dutch slang for mustache is "de befborstel" which comes from "beffen" which they claim differs from the Latin "cunnilingus" (a "combing of the tongue" and hence the bastardized "womb grooming") because it refers only to clitoral stimulation. The dutch word for "beaver" is "bever" which comes from the Proto Indo-European bhru for "brown"; as if to say "stimulate only in the brown, not the pink". Geographically, this would make the beard attached to said mustache an anal stimulant. Summing up, it is therefore simple to hypothesize a future melding of "forange" and "bizeard" into one very eccentric weard, which would be really weird considering both "weird" and the suffix "ward" already stem from an Old English word "weard" which once meant to "turn toward", not away from as it is typically thought weird things do.

foreign + strange = forange

-- Chris Leo


Freelapse is a get-out-of-jail-free-card relapse because it happens in spite of one's best intentions. A freelapse does not alter the course of one's recovery or abstinence from a certain substance or behavior, as long as it's acknowledged as an unexpected (not neccessarily unwanted) gift. When a recovering boozer's on a date with a hoozy who shows her boos for his schmoozy with a drink across his beauty, though on the road to recovery, if this guy feigns a "what's with the doozy, booty?" while actually being ps-ps-psyched for the opt to lap the sap off his lips cracked from the sauce lacked and skip merrily on his soberish way back, he's officially in the clear to relish this freelapse for all it's worth. And we are free to cheer him on.

free + relapse = frappes with hidden snaps

-- Patrick Brennan, Chris Leo


Fromage (1) may be French cheese, but in English it means fortified cheeze. They say there’s no word for “irony” in Chinese or politics, there’s also no word for “cheezy” in any language except English. So when Deng Xiaoping, feeling Western Society encroaching, commissioned publicly painted love poetry about “Red (Workers) Hearts”, it’s understandable if one was too confused to laugh. He was doubley hit. I felt the same way when Matt called me up to check out Chico’s new mural on the corner of D and Houston, “Dude you have to make a pilgrimage with me to the gorgeous fromage Chico just spay-painted for us! For us, man! All of us standing together! Chinese, Blacks, Latinos, Slavs, the elderly, the children, everybody, all standing together working seriously and reverently for the team!”

Fresco + homage = deliriously daily work with iron minus delicious dairy on walks with idling. See chezy entry.

-- Chris Leo


Fromage (2). I swear I saw palm trees, coconuts, sugar cane, giant blue agaves harvested by little men who then found beautiful women with roses in their jet black hair to stomp on the pulp naked up to their wastes because the enzymes on their skin helped ferment it better…no…in fact, it was just a fromage. I’ve made this mistake before. Just because there are palm trees and sand in Morocco and Algeria does not mean Francophones can make a drinkable margarita, and any Newyorker takes his margarita as seriously as they take their wine. Not funny. Very sad. Sadder yet when it gets drunken down regardless.

Frozen margarita + mirage = wrong desert, wrong continent, terrible joke, mean, cruel

-- Chris Leo

G

Gayese is the homophonic phenomenon wherein one's sexual preference homogynizes all languages into one syntax and tone.
i.e. "That table over there is speaking gayese but I can't understand exactly what they're talking about because its in Russian."

-- Chris Leo


Germantics leave no space for the bothersome banter of alien bacteria. They attempt infection with flawless, tight, and certain absolutes. When they strike with these irrefutable proofs, despite the apparent truths being dished, the lectured to still feels unease and wants to leave. Something’s not right. But what? The words? The math? The well boxed economy of everything? No those are all perfect. Examine this discourse for the irritation manifestation:
“Hey, how ‘bout we go to the beach today, Brad?”
“Excellent choice? But do you really think you can get ready in time? It’s 9am now. If we’re out of the house by 10 we’ll be on the beach by 10:45 right when it starts to get hot. If we go swimming before everyone else we’ll have the freshest water and be hungry for lunch before the hordes crowd the snack bar, yeah?…But if you can’t get ready soon we’ll be stuck in lunch traffic, not get the optimum spot on the sand, drink piss when we dunk our heads…”

germ + antics = sansoire vivre, poora vida, a German clock ticks like this: drip, drop, drip, drop…

-- Chris Leo


You’ve gone field if your art hits a home run despite your brain being benched in the dugout. Simone DiMaggio is a tour guide who brings British and American tourists from the port of Livorno to the center of Florence. Because he shares his name with the Yankee Clipper, Americans assume he’s not only the only proper Italian to like baseball, but that he’s also up on all our baseball-metaphors-for-every-ailment national theology. Therefore he's got no choice but to try and learn them all since they sock him with them every day.
On a drive together along the Tuscan coast listening to Neil Young’s “On the Beach” one morning Simone asked me, “But what exactly does he mean by ‘a million june bugs coming down the mountain’.”
“Unfortunately Simone, what he actually says is ‘a million dune buggies coming down the mountain’.”
“Oh Jesus, he’d really gone field by that point, no?”
“You mean gonfio (Italian for 'bloated') from his liver backfiring from abuse?”
“That too.”

gone field = gone + (yet something hits from) out of left field. See Steven Stills, but not Lou Reed. See Wire, but not Pink Floyd. See Captain Beefheart, but not the Rolling Stones.

-- Simone DiMaggio, Chris Leo


Gonelining. Antigone was the daughter of Oedipus whose name out of context looks like "anti" + "gone", or “not gone, here” whereas in fact the Greek “gone” signifies movement “from the womb, generation” which puts one in one thing and out of another. The secret to whether Antigone’s name, being the product of a mother and a son, rendered her either ultra on or gone unfortunately died with Euripides. The important point here is that antonyms “gone” and “on” have always been kissing cousins. Gonelining is the soothing pissing of hours/lives away online searching for the same sort of time bending chance encounter you once experienced on the street many shades of faith ago. Bouncing from Facebook to Myspace profiles hoping to bump into any new spark, I discovered myspamous and deflated, for as much as River Plates may want to believe navigating these pages takes us through both the Wild West and Alphabet City, currently only the Wild West is still the Wild West and Alphabet City is Alphabet City. And the worst thing about that myspamous entry is that even though we all know it to be true, when it works in reverse -- when everyone stops visiting your myspace account -- oh man it cuts, it cuts. Regardless of how netsophrenic we know those profile pages to be, wherein their online personality is something entirely different from their real life persona, it bruises when you get no hits.

-- Simon Henderson, César Alvarez, Brian Tunney, Chris Leo


Graping is either groping done under the influence of grapes or grappa, or the wrong way to play with a nipple. Not to be confused with grappling, which is the only way a Jack Sprat can play with his wife.

-- Chris Leo

H

'H' (indicated by another 'H' halved) . The apostrophe is a Roman creation originally employed to side-step the impossible 'H' their mouths refused (and still refuse) to make.
An apostrophe before a word began as the left half of a bisected 'H', an apostrophe after was the right half of a bisected 'H' -- half a breath was all the compromise the author asked; half an 'H', not quite the full pauses home, heads, whores, help, hustlers, hands, the Holy Ghost, Heaven, Hell, caipirinhas and the word 'huh' command, just a fraction to avoid the impossible frictive.

However, like the ypsilon and kappa Ceasar also failed to rub out, the 'H' kept going, plowing ahead, hiding in the wings for centuries of endless stabs at vengence. When an Italian says "hiding" it sounds like "iding" and the letter H grinds its blade to the bevel waiting to strike again as Bruto did on that fateful day. And strike it still does! It tosses Italians the English word "happy" and mocks in epiglottal aspirations as it comes out "appy" as an ape. Stealthily, it then places itself in front of words where it does not belong making "haminal" out of "animal" and writhes in pleasure from the overdue pennance. "All of god's beasts are just haminals to you, aren't they!?" Merciless H lashes upon the descendants of Rome, "So are you still unready to tell me why did you not only steal everything from Greece except me, but then also quartered me upon capture?!" Yes, the asteriskly transgressive history of the entire letter 'H' before and after its halfing (as you can project from these few but piquant examples) is a matter worthy of only the highest most honorable hagiography, but who feels like bothering with the study of a soundless letter? If we fall into that trap of studying the pause, what'll we do when we actually confront one? Well...We won't. Life inside a pause makes the pause no longer a pause, but something of substance, no? In fact, it's only through the study of the letters around the 'H' that its essence can be clarified.

Luckily, chance dumbed me into an exercise for this pause that engages the study of 'H' without succumbing to its lack: the extraction of all of my wisdom teeth got me hopped up on meds and hence I was able to stare at a fish in a tank in a window of a restaurant in Chinatown and, bored and zoned to my gills, I made fish mouth back to him. As a crazy, I was without race and therefore blended in better in Chinatown than I ever had before. That's when it hit me: I couldn't remember seeing fish on any nature show open and closing their mouths all the time like they do in fish tanks so I began to think that what I initially deemed "fish mouth" was really just the fish imitating us, "human mouth."
The sound of my lips puckering and unpuckering during fish mouth was that of popping 'p's so it was very easy for me to push the low level of things by calling them "pesce" everytime I made fish mouth rather than "fish" -- the p's were already popping, and that's when it hit me again: It must have been the hundredth 'pesce' I did back to the fish that brought my shortage of breath to expose the clue.

The letter 'F' is a popped 'P'. They stuck a pin right in the bubble to propel the word and they did the same thing to 'B' before that to give us 'P'(though it seems before the 'B' was a 'B' it may have been a 'V' they actually closed up to harness a bit of this air for a change).

I said "pesce' and then I said "ffffffishhhhhhhh" and swam away up the street with all the air just released and I wrote this so many times "for you" rather than "per te" so you could feel the long waft of the words from Italy through France to us and both pick up and give all this air along the way. It is, afterall, the same direction planes fly from Europe to America in accrodance with the way the wind already blows. I wrote this so many times all around the streets from Chinatown through Nolita catching more air through the leaves in Sara Delano's park that I managed to make it to my computer in time before they kept moving away from my memory. This lead me to a remarkable conclusion: the Romans were right! Forget the letter 'H' unless you wanna get hooked like a fish. Take a good look at it. It stands firmer and more direct than any other letter in the alphabet and yet it only indicates air. A sentinel for the stop. As an intuitive Italian would say, it creates more "hacktion" than "action". 'F' and "P' are both directives pointing the same way the sentence flows, impelling more as they go. Unless it's as hot as a hog-ist day, if you've got things to do follow the 'F' and plant your 'P's.

-- Chris Leo


Hackney is what all slang is called when exported from its streets. When my girlfriend accused me of "tumbling down the sink" (drinking) while talking to "Aristotle" (the bottle) at the "near and far" (bar) before heading out on a "Berkshire hunt" (for cunt) in "Bristol City" (and titties) for "ham and eggs" (and legs) with "raspberry ripples" (nipples) I said, "Your hack book-learned Cockney makes as little sense outside of Hackney as the paranoia beneath it."

Hack (crack, wack) + ney (as opposed to "yay") = a part of London you are not from

-- Chris Leo


Hangry. My health teacher at my all boys Catholic High School in New Jersey once asked this question on a test,
"When your wife has PMS what do you do?
a) Call a doctor
b) Rub her feet and make her french toast
c) Remind her over and over again that her temper is just the result of PMS
d) Leave the house"
Unless you chose the letter d he would have marked that question wrong. I chose c when I was seventeen. Now, faced with a similar but far less odious take on a question about human nature I've learned another way to look at things simply:

When Italians are hungry, feed them. "Sapore" is "taste" in Italian, "sapere" is "to know", and they both stem from the same Latin root, sapere.

When Laura is hungry she is too flustered to worry about this letter H that's plagues Italians and words get fused together as the anxious bile boils them up.

hungry + angry = hangry

-- Chris Leo


The haviary is a harboring sanctuary sans sanctions but it takes some time getting used to for everything is yours if you only promise to set it free, including your own passage to come and go as you please. Founded on a feather from a wing plucked into a plume it pricks the present as it passes the past in a circular search – into the sky? Well not necessarily; there's even a limit beyond which birds can’t fly, a silent ceiling further astray of their way than the clumsy foraging on the ground. Don't forget, it is this clumsy foraging ground where birds mate. You have it, the aviary is yours, but if you hold it – well take a close look at that word: you can’t. Hold the have on the old ave or you’ll have the hold on Avenue Old, tweet tweet.

-- Chris Leo


Head of Pompey. I hadn’t spoken to Helen in ages. Too much had passed to attempt a patchy catching up so I decided instead to send her the fresh manuscript of “Serengeti” I’d slaved over all winter in Bologna. It was so fresh I had yet to change it from its working title "Viva Vigo, Viva Fica" to the proper "Serengeti". With too much to say, I opted for the simple and brief, “Woman, don’t worry, you’re not in this one (but then again no one is, it’s fiction afterall), xxx, cdl” email along with it which I naturally assumed she’d read as an “I’m missing you.” In two days I received her reply. Apparently it had been too long since we’d spoken. Apparently “Serengeti” was too cluttered with theories in the beginning to see the story through and by the end it was too driven by pure story lacking any theories period. The constant preoccupied soliloquies with the protagonist’s cock made it so no one, neither woman nor man, had the ability nor desire to empathize. Because the foundation to call this author a sexist, racist, misanthrope, all of 'em, stood on far far far less firmer ground (as in none) than if one were to call Dostoevsky a murderer for making Raskolnikov near loveable, she held herself back as much as she could with the pleasing-to-no-party-half-stepping “Let’s just say it uneased my humanistic side.” I began typing the gutted response of “Ha! So what you're really saying is that you’re jealous you couldn’t see yourself as the True Love and you’re paranoid that you may in fact be inspiration for one of the lesser breeds while at the same time feeling miffed that you’re probably neither and I always thought good fiction couldn’t be distinguished from non-fiction and vice-versa” when my girlfriend’s cat, the Marquis de Pajamas, dropped Señor Fluffy, my parrot of fifteen years -- the same parrot and dear friend I taught to speak three languages and walk a tight rope from mast to mast across a model of a 16th century Spanish galleon-- dead at my feet. I deleted the email and cried. Grazie Marquis, I suppose this means I’m in. Grazie, I suppose.

Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, or Pompey, was a founding seat in Julius Ceasar's original Triumvirate who fled Rome upon news of Ceasar's fabled crossing of the Rubicon (I've since crossed that thing a thousand times in expectance of some die to cast). At the outbreak of the Roman civil war Pompey sought refuge from Ceasar in Egypt. Before disembarkation even, Egyptian king Ptolemy XIII decapitated Pompey in front of his wife and children in an effort to gain better standing with Ceasar. When Ceasar was then presented with Ptolemy's offering of the head of Pompey he's said to have burst into tears for, though technically a rival at the time, this was no fitting end for a former ally, son-in-law, and consul of Rome. Ceasar instead reciprocated the gift with the eventual regicide of Ptolemy himself.

-- Chris Leo


Hinis. The millennia of repeated pillaging of Gorth by the Morgs from Newbridge was known as “The Totally Mean War”. It is true that no Morg weaponry could penetrate Gorth hides, but any open holes they did find were deemed mere sheaths for their swords, sometimes going in one while coming out the other -- a move they called "the bloody boner". Gorths being lesser beasts refused the constraints of clothes and armor that could’ve protected them by simply covering up these orifices, but they saw them as rather "orifeces" which therefore needed the freedom to excrete. Superstitious Gorth priests also believed covering them unhallowed their traditional “hankypanky” mellow and “the pucusmucus”. Enter the hinis! Arghghgh!!! Arrrrrgggh! The Highness of Beach Street, fed up with the “whatever, whatever” attitude of these homoqueer priests, gathered all the wizards and witches of the land and decreed the creation of a new warrior with minimal orifeces. Within a fartnight, Gorth Maximus was born. With only one eye, one nostril, and one ear inbetween his eye and his nostril, he was already fairly rad. He was even green because the sorcerers befitted him with chlorophyll so he wouldn’t need a mouth, the sun would be enough. But the greatest innovation, the innovation that liberated Gorth from the blitzing of the Morgs once and for all was the hinis. Instead of one hole for the hiney and one for the weeney, thereby exposing himself to Morg blades twice, Gorth Maximus had only one hole for all functions called the hinis! It existed where our taint does now, inbetween both holes, further protected from damage by being blocked by the thighs which they called “the things”. Though the Gorths called this evolution the hinis, to the Morgs it was the penus, as it took care of both penis and anus functions. If you were good at it you could even make a loud boopsie from it.

If Australia had an Australia marsupials would have these there.

-- Billy


The hinternal debate is an integrally woven daydream of every cittadini: is the clamor of the conviviality killing me or keeping me alive? Can getting blitzed at night to soothe my nerves sizzled by the day when I eat well to aid me organs bruised by the blitzing at night to soothe my nerves properly be considered a “balance” of sorts or is there something more pastoral that better approximates that word beckoning from the hinterlands upstate?

-- Chris Leo

I

Idolatrine worship is submission in bent prostration to porcelain gods accompanied by the speaking of tongues. An idolatte is the slight of slipping spirits in with creams that leads to this plastered repentance into alabaster vessels. Slavoratory prayers are false promises of tomorrow’s abstinent servitude offered from bathroom floors in exchange for it all to just go away.

idol + latrine = when Exodus' list exits us in fits

-- Chris Leo


Inarrabato is the combination of three Italian words to describe one emotion Freud would have told us exists in each word individually already: “Innamorato” (in love) + “arrabbiato” (angry) + “arrapato” (horny). Italians would have then told Freud, ”Old news.” For a less suaver exploration of the same subject visit the passassinate entry.

-- Olayinka Fagbayi, Chris Leo


Infiermo, "enfermo" (sick in Spanish)+ "infierno" (Spanish hell), is an addition of two negatives that amounts to one bombastic muthafuckin' positive: SICCCKKKK AS HEEELLLLLLLL. "Son, ya heard!?! That vocal manipulation on the new Snoop cut 'Sexual Eruption' is INFIERMO. IN-FI-ERMO, kid."
"Hail Yes doctor, administer me some aloe vera for the burn induced from those infiermic beats. Jaysus!"

-- Alley Deheza, Chris Leo


Inginious. Though gin was first marketed in England as a health elixir, it's believed to be a direct source of a population decline there in the mid-18th century. Inginious. I am even sipping on gin now as I write this to dry up my enflamed nasal cavity and it isn't working. Incredible. Despite all evidence otherwise, gin still isn’t convinced it's an enemy of the body. When quinine was used to fight malaria in the tropics in the 20th Century gin snuck itself into the tonic to ease the taste, but anyone who’s ever tasted gin knows gin eases nothing on the palette. Inginious. In fact, it was eventually the fruit juices added to mask its taste, not vice versa, that birthed the proper cocktail in Prohibition era New York. Gin is known as the “smart booze” because the bitter taste constricts one’s mouth muscles funneling the words off the tip of the tongue giving them more pricked direction than all the other boozes (which give none) thereby making one feel wicked inginious.

-- Chris Leo


Inspiteful is like when a boss wages psychological warfare on his employee via a scheming peer-to-peer guise. When I began working as a paralegal in Manhattan for this dirtbag from Long Island who returned every night to what he called “Wrong Island” my distrust was initially piqued. Traitor. When said asshole then started calling me his impiegato (“employee” in Italian) because he knew I spent the other part of my life in Italy, my disgust leaped to a boil because the only language he actually spoke couldn’t even be clasified as English. I call it simply the “language of small dicks”. You know the kind I mean? The kind that begins at an impossibly high register but still manages to flip up and slow down at the end of the sentence like only a perverted question could? So why impiegato? Because his idea was that if he could approach me at an eye-to-eye level I’d be duped into thinking we were friends and follow all his orders like a comrade-in-arms. The thing is, when impiegato is the only Italian word that made it into his lexicon, even the most unparanoid amongst us would start to hear “my imp and gatto” of which I am neither. All of my fears were confirmed once he also greeted the whole office in the morning with “Chris is going to make us coffee this morning because, seeing as he spends so much of his time in Italy, he can make a better coffee than any of us” even though we use a different machine entirely in Italy, sfigato.

insight + spite = manipulative constipated evil mastermind

-- Chris Leo


Interventors, isn’t it great, are somehow always thinking what I’m thinking. Even though they didn’t say it, they beat me to it. That’s why they like me. I'm think like they think, they just internalize their art. My humor/talent/smarts jive ‘cause, funny, that’s exactly what they’ve been up to lately as well. All the ideas that came in (“in” + the Italian “venire” for “to come” = “invent”) just never made it out because they inter + vented (from the Latin “ventus” for “wind”). But let it be noted loudly here that the same cowardice preventing interventors from officially participating also makes them easy prey to mass delusions. Seeing as there is no individual to the interventor who believes all thoughts to be shared, all of them coming from this collective “us”, they wind up placing too much faith in this “us” and thereby missing choice moments like this to shine: so speaking of wind and vents, I propose that it is one massive civil oversight across countries and centuries to build windmills vertical and not horizontal. Take a few breathes and digest. Top amongst the many benefits is that horizontal windmills would never stop spinning now would they? If I'm missing something, well at the very least couldn't they have horizontal and vertical windmills working in tandem? Expected belittling rebuttal from the interventor? Nope. This time “I was thinking the same thing” pits the interventor against society and that footing's not firm enough, whereas “there must be a reason” puts him too with society and that’s too vacuvented to vent.

-- Chris Leo


Irreversible has a reverse side, which is reverse stuck on reverse. Señor Fluffy ate poison and died just like that and am I no longer convinced the "ir" prefix is a negator, more an electrical shock indicator: ~reversible, ~regular, ~regardless (whose redundant "ir" proves it's no negator). When the shock waves cease you're left simply ill: illogical, illegal, ilreversible. When the heartbreak softens one can only hope the "il" mellows to an "in" which can vacillate between positive and negative pulls: inconceivable, incriminate, incubus, inreversible.

-- Chris Leo


Italian Brunch , or quasi-formally la prena (pranzo, "lunch + cena, "dinner"), is the activity done on the day after treking through Italian Green. It is a meal that happens between lunch and dinnertime. This differs from the American linner (lunch + dinner) which is one of several mealtimes that day, whereas Italian brunch is the only meal of the day and may last the duration of many meals combined. It's also worth noting that normal Italian dinners do not begin before 8:30 at the earliest. This means la prena generally falls around 6:30 -- the same time the proper American dinner is just beginning. Therefore, if one was to skip breakfast and lunch in the States due to fasting or a busy day, it wouldn't be improper for him to then refer to his one meal as "la prena" as long as he was sure to take it slow. Americans travelling abroad have also been known to call la prena a Spanish breakfast.

Banquet once meant "a small snack between meals". "Lunch" comes from "luncheon" from the French nonechenche for "noon drink", not food -- or if it is food, it's still barely food, coming from the Spanish lonja for "a slice". "Noon" comes from the Latin "nonus" for "nine" and was once the "ninth hour of sunlight in the day" which is three pm not twelve. "Dinner" comes from the French disner which began as breakfast. In New York, women eat in secrecy before proper dinner dates as to appear unfamished, refined, and elegant at the restaurant table. The remnants of the verb mangiare, "to eat" in Italian, are found only in animal words in English like "munch" and "manger". Which is all to say, neither the time of day nor size of meal should shock anyone when "appetite" and "petite" are such close cousins.

As you tabulate the table keep in mind that things run counter on the counter.

-- Chris Leo


Italian Green. While discussing the different regions of Italy with Laura I blashpemed just to see how it felt and because I wanted to hear myself say something out loud to decide once and for all if the thought inside my head had any real resonating strength or not. I said, yes, Tuscany may be the greenest, but if I wanted that shade of green I'd live in New York City and travel upstate when I needed nature. I said I prefered a green that was more Italian specific like the hillsides of Le Marche and Lazio.
"I know the kind of green you're talking about Chris. More like a brown, right? This is what you meant by Italian Green? Brown, eh?"

Poor brown, it's been losing an under the radar battle to green for millenia whilst the rest of the world is caught up mitigating the endless white vs black saga. Brown is not a Latin based word. Germany exported what would become "Bruno" into Italy and it took root as both a given and a surname, depending on the perceived depth of one's darkness. Italians chose not to use their own word "marrone" because Bruno conveniently already sounded like "Bruto" ("ugly"). Meanwhile, Italy exported "marrone" which took shape in the pallid North as "moron." Not fair. One etymology even has marrone coming from "amarone", "big and bitter". Another has it coming from the Arabic "marrano" which literally means "pig, swine" and was used as a form of contempt in Spain towards (brown) Moors and Jews that converted to Christianity. "Lumber" comes from the Italian province of Lombardia and everyone knows we couldn't have the brown endproduct if the trunk didn't bear green leaves first. Unfair. The brown earthen matter "Umber" comes not only from an incredibly green region of Italy, Umbria, but also comes from the Proto-Indo-European andho which means "shade" -- and again, there can be no shade if there are no green leaves to canopy over. But do not worry, brown doesn't need your pity. The many maligns have left it with brawn from the bruises and brews to soothe them, all from the same source. Occasionaly brown even wins small battles: by the time the brown trunk is scaled, one has often been known to experience vertigo amidst the vertical vert. And afterall, is there really much of a difference between the green leprechaun of Ireland and Scotlands wee goblin, the "Brownie"? Yes, whether you find it lumbersome from Swedish or cumbersome from Latin, there will always be brown where there is green, white where there is black, hatred where there is envy...

Italian Green = Brown

-- Chris Leo

J

Jailousy is to Lucifer what aspiritions are to the apparition Michael. Not only do no words between words appear when jammed in jailousy, even printed words refuse to congeal with this misplaced zeal. Non sensed chapters fly by but the clock has not moved. Nonsense, another guy? Rye cut with rye, and real men don’t cry but this clock will not move. Jailousy brings with it only two weighted letters as you wait and wait -- NV – and your pen runs inkless locked in this pen. Like the jalopy you are j’lousy immured in your self-cemented vault, all because “it was her fault…”

-- Chris Leo


The jamello/a vs the gemeglio/a debate gives stark insight into the conflict at the base of all things. A "gemello/a" is a twin in Italian. "Jamella" is slang for the cooler of the two, “the jams”, whereas "gemeglio/a" is slang for the hotter of the two, “gem” + “meglio” (“better” in Italian). Though Italian slang clearly favors the better looking of the two, the argument is still up for debate in the rest of the modern world. “Twin” comes the Proto-Indo-European root dwo like nearly every other word for “two”. However, couldn’t one argue that the English “twin” encompasses the jamello/a vs gemeglio debate all in one word: t’win, to win? Which one will it be, nature or nurture? The exception to this rule is the sibling loving gaymello/a who, though technically both incestual and homosexual, is considered (rather jealously) by all as simply narcissistic.

-- Chris Leo


Just deserves a third meaning as a combination of its first two meanings (it should go without saying that a sum of all meanings of any word is also always valid). "Yeah, you're right Susan I know I know, unlike all the other schleps this one is a just, upright, law abiding guy, yet he's just...y'know he's just..." lacking that je ne sais quoi as just just people often are. "Aw give 'em a try Sally, you never know, he might just justify you with a juicy jussive jut or two yet."

-- Chris Leo

K

A Kaaboob is the catastrophic combination of an antonym and a synonym to split an atom. Don’t do it. For example, if someone who is half North American and half South American therefore thinks it fair to call themselves simply an “American” our system does not compute and we twitch and sizzle asking the same question again and again until supplied a new answer. Arabbi, "Arab" + "rabbi" = a super exponentialed "arrabiato" ("angry" in Italian), might be the most combustable kaaboob. Another both excellent and terrible (more terrible than excellent) example is a holmo, which being the unstable element of three words in one, destructs the mind that attempts to define. An eponym from the reputably Rasputinesque ultrahetero John Holmes combined with “homosexual” and the neutral “hole”, the idea is that no matter how gay this guy may be, he needs a woman in his bed because he can’t fit in the other end, i.e. “Call me crazy, but I think Maurice is eyeing Laura more than me! You think he’s really packing like a holmo?” The instability of this element is so volatile it threatens to strike River Plates down with every passing second, pulverizing this dictionary back into the dust from whence it came.

Kaaba (the cube inside the Great Mosque of Mecca) + boob = Kaboom!

-- Anonymous


Klandestine little American burgs out in the sticks are destined to be crawling with the Klan through aid of the clandestine land. “Clann” was the Gaelic word for “plants”, of which these people still live amongst though they eat none of because "plants are for fayags". In the Middle Ages it was common practice for Christians to sign an “X” next to their name as a symbol of the Cross. In response chutzpahtic Jews often drew a circle next to theirs. From the Greek “Kyklos” for “circle” we get both the derisive “kike” for the circular inscription next to a Jewish signature and “Kuklux” for the clan that burns their beloved crosses down to a circle of embers on the ground.

-- Chris Leo

L

A labrador, literally “lips of gold” (from Italian “labbra d’oro”), is a kiss so deep, seductive, and sucktive, it takes two hands clasped tight to the skull, two noses too sunk into cheeks to breathe, and leaves the lover enchanted in a trance with as much wonder and star-laced confusion as the word itself is obscured in. Labrador. Was this part of Canada actually named after fabled lips of gold? Do the webbed feet of the Labrador (or was it Golden?) Retriever in fact allude to a fish-lipped mythical mermaid? Or a kiss as wet and sloppy as the maritime dog? Or was it named after the fabled “Arms of Gold” Chinese smelteries there, “Les Bras D’Or”? And while we have possibilities for lips, arms, and feet, what about the ear from aureole? And while we have aureole do we then also have areola? Oh Jesus, I can see everything I can’t see anything I’m in love! Or was it after the Portuguese navigator Joao Fernandes Lavrador who claimed he was the first to map it? Though this may initially seem like the least romantic etymology, it takes but an ABRACADABRA and his name looks a lot like that kiss again: Lavrador, love/adore. And who was the first to settle in it after all, the Irish, Basques, Vikings, or Micmaks? Newfoundland is separated from Labrador by the Straits of Belle but is the other half of the same province and whether it was so named after “New Finland” (the country), “New Vine Land” (thick bush),“New Found Land” (new found land), or “New Fin Land” (abundance of cod) is another subject of endless debate. In the past hundred years it has gone from an independent nation to a dominion of England to a Canadian province and if Quebec succeeds in seceding it's expressed interest in becoming part of the United States. The Straits of Belle, when used in the same sentence as a labrador kiss, refer to the “belle” mouth attached to these bewitching lips. Unfortunately, the ever witty kids of St. Johns have debased the romantic notion in recent years. “Labrador” has become “labradoor” and “Straits of Belle” have become “Straits of Balls”, as in “she gave me the key to open her labradoor, unbuckled my belt, and I navigated right into the Straits of Balls.”

-- Chris Leo


La Fence is L’ingla Franca slang for “France”. It is seen as the true border of Roman and Northen tribes despite other Latin words having already been put into use for regions further out. “Beyond the Pale” may refer to Irish land free from British dominion, but all of its functions are Roman. A “palus” in Latin was a series of stakes used as a fence; some hypothesize a connection to the idea that it kept the pallid out. “Pole” comes from the same root and brings us to the other edge of the empire, Poland. Polish claim their name comes from polijane, which means “field dwellers”, but to a Roman the stark never-ending steppe was its own sort of fence (think "nowhere to run to" gulag) and hence a competing etymology. It borders on another border, the Ukraine, which means "border" in Russian. Denmark was the northern border in the time of Augustus and though the root of "den" is subject to much debate, it is generally agreed that the "mark", like "margin", comes from the Proto-Indo-European mereg for "boundary" -- beyond which is Scandinavia, literally "cut off". A fence, like the sport, comes from “defense”. “La Défense” is the modern business district that lies geographically on the fence of Paris and ideologically on the fence with the Olde and New Worlds. French say France doesn’t begin until one hundred kilometers inside France. One fence makes a division; two fences plot a lot; endless fences form a city; and so functioning like every vaccine, by France fighting fence with more fence they stand forever as the francon ("lance" like "palus"!) they took their name from. Vive La Fence!

-- Chris Leo


Languistes are adherents to rules set by governing bodies of languages. One who speaks French is not neccessarily a languiste, but one who consults the forty Immortels for guidance (who once even placed a ban on the study of etymology) is. It is impossible for any English speaker to be a languiste, but if they compose text messages in complete and proper sentences they are oddly attempting to be. The paradox of the languistes is that this over concern with articulation fails to generate a solid and beautiful articulation of why and how they try to pull these reins in.

languid + guide = linguistics led by lifelessness

-- Chris Leo


Liebero, “libero” (“free” in Italian) + “liebe” (“love” in German), is a tactical Freudian slip of the pen. “I am liebero tonight” could insinuate one is either free and easy, superhumanly libidinous (like Electro, Eclipso, and Magneto, make way for Liebero!), or both. “No, my boyfriend is clueless. He’s got a game to watch tonight so I’m totally liebero” means you helped an old woman cross the street in your past life.

-- Chris Leo


--lite is a misleading suffix used in the promotion of packaged low calorie food. The truth is, only food that approaches the consistency of light becomes lighter, whereas food derived from a long list of mysterious ingredients from minerals and rocks can really only become “liter”(from the Greek lithos for stone). Think about the rocks in your drinks at "nite" not as igneous, because those come from fire not ice, not Ignatius because he is a saintly spirit and spirits don't freeze, but as extraneous as the stalagmites on your colon, anthracite in your arteries, and kimberlitic xenoliths that must pass painfully through the penis all due to your attempted shortcut at making things "liter". Many a gormond has argued that this isn't a problem because true delights are in fact de ("off") + light, the further away the better. But when "claret" begins in France pronounced clahray and it takes but the British Channel (and perhaps a finished bottle) to change it into clah-ret, nothing in etymology is clear. "Delight" comes from the Old French delit ("to please greatly")and was spelled "delite" in England up until the 16th century! Back to where we began then -- a delite ,from some sorcerer's stone-ite, is therefore a morsel of alchemy in the mouth.

lite = Crystal Light, as low cal and crystal forming as a lough calcite

-- Chris Leo, Giorgio Grappi


L’Ingla Franca is the branch of English spoken between natives of non-English speaking countries who do not speak each other’s respective native tongues. It is a proper language in its own right, which often having been learned in schools, follows more rules than the English spoken by native English speakers. At the present, there is no subset of L’Ingla Franca available for natives of different English speaking countries to communicate in; so as Spaniards and Italians generally stick to their own languages when speaking together, an Australian and a Jamaican speaking together must also attempt their own English and hope context fills in the blanks.

-- Chris Leo


Localties and localtons come from all sides of the tracks. They are well-welcomed words that exist free of mood though they touch tender topics. Localties -- good, bad, and indifferent -- are the general eats of a given locale. A località is a localty that is a specialty cooked by the localtons who may or may not be simpletons or viscounts from the county villas. A localton is simply a local ingrained with the earth he treads. Therefore, if one stumbles upon exquisite flautas in the Mexican neighborhood of Corona, Queens it is certain that he will find himself eating a genuine localty, but it can not yet be considered a località nor will it be cooked by localtons. Seeing as the Mexicans are new arrivals to Corona and their next move is unpredictable, the current generation may be locals but not official localtons. If in due time the Mexicans remain Mexicans and embed themselves in Corona, they will appear with the air of localtons, and if their flautas continue to be excellent one would then find themselves eating a veritable località.

localty = when a localite asks for something “low cal” neither party understands the other, but neither party also neither knows

-- Amy Leo, Chris Leo

M

Magrasso (magra/skinny + grasso/fat in Italian/English) is relative obesity. Laura's been riding our 16 pound Fica the pussy cat's tail to lose at least 2 while at the same time pressuring me to gain at least 5 to what she considers an emaciated 125 pound frame, whereas in the scheme of things isn't it me who outclasses Fica 6 times over in universal gluttony? Not to be confused with skinny fat which can manifest anywhere from the muscless theigh of a geisha to the cheese doodle and root beer raised man boobs of the frail computer wiz. Peakolo (English "peak" + Italian "piccolo" for "small"), however, is a related concept referring to when tall things are small. A baby giraffe is peakolo. And yes, I call my girlfriend "baby" and my cat "signora".

-- Chris Leo, Kiernan Moriarty


Mal Dente , the opposite of pasta al dente, refers to overcooked pasta the Italians call "scotto". Certain dialects also use Al Dante, who it is said served his pasta so mushy it could have only been forgotten in the Inferno. Non dente is cooked the same way as "mal dente", but translating literally to "no teeth required" it's a neccessary staple at nursing homes and nurseries and carries none of the scathing Italians seethe when put in the presence of pasta "mal dente." Whether non Dante is a synoym or antonym depends solely on the waiter's inflection into the service window and the word's deflection off of klanging pots. Stu dente is pasta barely cooked at all by an over zealous foreign student just trying to "when in Rome" it but failing. Folk etymologists have the spicy pasta "arrabbiata" (literally, "angry pasta") following the same path as pasta stu dente. The story goes that Saracen Arabs being the first to teach Italians how to dry their pasta were blamed when those not put in the loop that dried pasta must be cooked longer than pasta fresca became arrabbiato at the crunchy pasta these Arab swindlers sold them. Though it may be true that "Arab" comes from the same rep Proto-Indo-European root as "rape", "rage", and "rabid", history has the Saracens raising a lot less rowdiness in Southern Italy than the other colonizers it's been raft with through the centuries. I mean, the same Saracens not only gave us gelato, but their Arab ancestor Ernest Hamwi is even solely credited with popularizing the ice cream cone at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, which brings us to Pasta fondente, literally "melting pasta", the most delicious pasta of all. Made of white chocolate penne rigate and conditioned with a confectioners cherry coulet, it can only be found in the Ticino province of Switzerland. Pusta and puzza (which also means "stinky" in Italian) are overarching compromises that a small but saintly collection of Italians have agreed to call pasta and pizza served in America, i.e. "It's good...no really, it is...it's just that it is neither pasta nor pizza. If we gave them new names I could enjoy them more free of sin. How about..." The difficulty thereafter is in convincing this same group that American words don't require the same vowel agreement Italian words do. If we fail at this linguistic battle, "pizza pies" become "puzza poos" and the Saracen falafel shack across the street starts to tug at my shoes.

-- Amy Leo, Chris Leo


Malpensa is a nightmare in the form of a daydream. Though “male” (“bad” in Italian) + “pensa” (“to think” in Italian) translates literally to a “bad idea”, it didn’t stop anyone from naming the largest airport serving metropolitan Milan “Malpensa”. It did however prevent someone from considering that an airport located 45 minutes outside of town by bus or shuttle trains (to then get to connecting trains) that don’t run late could inconvenience commuters. Perhaps it was modelled on it’s sister situation, Kennedy International Airport in New York City. This city within a city is not only located over 25 miles from Manhattan, but also requires two trains with two separate tolls to pay on the endless journey to and fro. In Doric Scottish, “ken” is “to know”, “ne” is “no”, and (phonetically) eeday is an “idea”, which like Malpensa, translates to “no known idea.” Don’t fall asleep on the train to the plane though, you might miss your flight! Instead, stare out the window, grind your teeth, and daydream about terrible terrible things.

-- Chris Leo


Marriage, marage, merrage, mirage, whatever, etc, are desceltic words that mar (from the Proto-Indo-European mers for “trouble, confuse”) themselves as soon as the promise (originally the Latin “promittere” for “to send forth” as if move away from itself) is pledged (from the French “pleige” for “hostage”). The preacher prophecies the paradoxes almost as soon as he opens his big fat mouth with “for better or for worse.” When something is as open as the mare (sea) to Mars (god of war) why signify it at all? A stud is a male horse used for breeding, but comes from the Germanic “stute” which in fact was a mare; not unlike how “marry” came from the Latin “maritus” for “husband” even though that word has its origins in the Proto-Indo-Europen "meri" which was a “young wife”, and “husband” has its roots in Old Norse “husbondi” or “house bound”, an idea more closely linked these days with the unfortunate state of wives than with the men out in the fields. “Matrimony” comes from the Latin “matrem” (mother) + “monium” (action) and like our Mary with the virgin birth, says nothing of the men, unless we’re to assume the “action” part was a Roman way of agreeing with the homeboys: “men go woof woof”. “Wedlock” perhaps paints the imploding picture clearest. “Wed” is Old English for “marriage”, but the "lock" isn’t what it used to be. “Lac”, like the Latin “monium”, was just a suffix to signify action. Over time, as the couple built their house, added extensions, posted their fence, and put gates on the top of stairways so the baby wouldn’t tumble down, the acting “lac” became one very walled in “lock”.

At least we have “merry” from the Proto Germanic “murgijaz” for “short lasting”. Enjoy your merrage while it lasts spouses (from the Latin “spondere” for “bound” – and when they say bound, a word that is its own antonym, they mean “in sickness or in health” that either definition applies).

-- Chris Leo


Medimorphosis. I finally escaped from the kids and found myself at an excellent aperitivo hour with well-balanced plates. This is my time, out right after work. There were pizzettes rather than pizzas and the focaccia was cut into small pieces. There were salads abutting meats, or tuna to be precise. There were crudités in bowls next to hard grain mini rolls. People rarely nursed more than a glass or two of negroni or opaque long-legged wine through the mingling. Someone turned thirty again and my god, that table is one caging succubus. There were Burberry scarves. Yes there were sweaters. Yes there were slacks of every ambiguous cut. Yes there was black to hide the fat but with tomorrows impending workday it still lacked attraction. Ooh, a movie in bed after underneath my fluffy down comforter, a joint, and a flurry of wild web searches and contentness shall be mine indeed. Joy? Well no, but contentness and comfort yes. There are still Saturday nights and the mystery of what might happen after Sunday's brunch left for joy.

median + morphosis = "medium form", a graduation into gray

-- Chris Leo


Il Moondo, the world of nightlife. Never use this. Keep it just between us.

-- Chris Leo


Multifascisted governments work well for all the wrong reasons: impasses. They’ve abolished the death penalty because too many voters despise their idiosyncratic neighbors to such an extent that, in the event that let’s say one day it should happen that they hack the neighbor to a pulp, they need an assurance that the courts will go as light on their own sentencing as they did with that Arab who raped the pristine Catholic girl with his eyes, no? They stand for freedom of speech because White Pride Day feels like a second Halloween and, even though the Spics better start speaking English now or leave, Mexican Appreciation Day does bring with it cheap margaritas and drinking legally on the streets. And getting back to wetbacks, well the respectable and humanitarian citizens of this multifascisted state are also against building that wall along the border with Mexico…because who else can we turn to for such cheap labor, aye? Degos, wops, niggers, honkies, chinks, kikes, and those left out because they aren't even considerable! I’ll stand up for you if you stand up for me, pigs!

multifaceted + fascists = America, awesome, and very possibly an internal debate turned public

-- Chris Leo

N

Nadar is the radar for the nadir of nada. When Marcello thought the best way to dispose of excess Christmas cookies would be to have an eat off I bailed with, “Sorry pal, but my nadar’s freaking out.” When the sun is threatening to rise on the Lower East Side and a slice of pizza after last call amidst a stag party seeking tail still hadn't killed hope for play and Jay says, “Ho’s and treats guaranteed at Ho-Min’s Chinese speakeasy down the street” and another table of the sloppily sloshed says “Grandissssimo” and Jay says “Vamanos!” that’s when you say, “Would love to man, but this selection of satyrs is making my nadar blow up -- manana manana can’t wait to hear your tales of conquest at coffee manana” and hail one home. A gaggle of guys at five in the morning might also set one’s gaydar afire, but in this case they are simply failures. When “What’s your sedar say?” is responded to with “Just counting the omer until I strike this homer and lap her shebrew” you say “then see you after Sinai, shalom holmes” and wish your friend good luck. When “Hey, and how’s your haydar reading?” is responded to with “Everything stable, everything’s stables” things are going rather well.

-- Chris Leo


A nanone (literally a “giant midget” but sounding like a “not not”) addresses the philosophical concept that diminutives added to nouns must make the word larger in order to indicate that the idea is smaller.

-- Chris Leo


Negrotiate. What makes a word a word? What validates it? Can every utterance a child spits out properly be considered a word? River Plates has fluffed its feathers proudly flaunting the maxim that we accept them all while enjoying/provoking the instability as we wait and see how they fall. Good, bad, and indifferent all words are temporal. The question is how temporal, millennia or minutes? And does temporality have anything to do with merit? And does it reflect deeper things about the cultures at large who inherit these sounds? In more than one definition we’ve pugilistically shoved the “most words come from the street” threat into your (possibly paranoidly perceived) airy eruditical mugs eager to hear what you’re gonna throw back at us. Have we been scared? No, we haven’t been scared. So you connect. So you land us a black eye. Girls like guys with black eyes. It’s the guys who walk away from fights without even a scratch on ‘em that really freak people out. Too studied, no heart, just like our streetless words. And then you get to a word like negrotiate, a word straight from the streets, and for a few palpitating minutes we think maybe it’s time to take back every linguistic lunge we ever levied.

I heard this word only once from a man who nicknamed himself off a nickname. “My name’s Big John, but most people call me Botswana.” Very curious for an Italian-American who goes by Botswana and who orders a side of "blackeroni and cheese" everyday at lunch to invent words like negrotiate, but hold these thoughts for a bit and ride this with us. Botswana was the foreman on a house I was building an extension on in New Jersey one summer. In typical Jersey fashion, the extension to this house would not only eventually be bigger than the house itself, but also cost more than if the sentimental guinea who didn’t want to give up “his casa” was just to have built a whole new one from scratch. When it came time for lunch, being the youngest and least experienced of the crew, I’d be sent out to get the hoagies. “Leo, just nigger-rig that thing already and go get us our food” was Botswana’s way of saying, “Expediency is more important here than efficiency. Just put a nail in it and run.” “Dude, I don’t respond to anything with the word nigger in it. Is jerry-rig too neutral a term for you to use?” “Ooooh, look at lil’ Leo with all his social conscience. Gonna go to a nigger free lil’ campus college somewhere in New England next year and argue for the equality of the black man, eh? Oh you good little guilt-ridden pussy you. So you mean to tell me if the hottest bitch in the world was to walk onto this site right now in nothing but a fur coat and a slab of beef blocking the path between your mouth and her crotch and said ‘eat your way through it nigger’ you wouldn’t start munching like a hyena with a giraffe’s cock up his ass?! You sweet thing, you.” Neither “nigger-rig” nor any word in any way involving “nigger” will ever find its own private nook in River Plates. Why? They’re just words aren’t they? Why “negrotiate” and not “nigger-rig”? The short answer is that, unlike all the other racial libels Botswana would hurl at me, Ahmed the “abalabalaba” (Arab), or Tommy the "Moulinyan" (Southern Italian dialectical slur of “melanzane”, Italian for “eggplant”, New Jersey way of saying someone is from so far south in Italy it mine as well be considered Africa and hence their cocks are as black as a moulinyan -- which somehow amounts to an insult), this one made me stop dead in my tracks, try desperately to think, and eventually give way to laughter: “Shut your whining mouth lil’ Leo, you are not about to negrotiate your way out of this job!” “…Sorry, what the fuck did you just say to me, negrotiate?!” And yes, I must admit, I finally broke down and laughed. Negrotiate made me laugh. Whether it was out of appall, shock, disbelief, fatigue, or just humor, I laughed.

Negrotiate stayed in my cap unwhispered until now, more than fifteen years later. It popped into my head again on a recent train ride back from Rome to Bologna. I’d forgotten my novel to read at home and only had an Italian grammar book and an Italian dictionary with me. Grammar books are infinitely more useful at learning languages than dictionaries, yet for one reason or another I don’t find the same joy in syntax as I do in words. I picked up the dictionary with a bit of frustration because I knew I was making the wrong choice and for the first time I said it with the prictulation of a brat, like dicktionary. Yes, here I was like a man, unable to relax and dig into the subtler, nuanced, and more fabric relevant feminine sides of language like syntax and conjugation. All I wanted was the meat, the words, the lame dicktionary. Oh, so weak. I wanted to get this weak word out of my head before I wasted any more time rationalizing child’s play. So I leafed through the pages eventually stopping at “nazialismo” (“nationalism” in Italian) and as my train zipped through the beautiful Tuscan hillside, rather than enjoying the view, I instead scribbled down thoughts about how “natalismo” (from “natale”, the belief that Jesus’ virgin birth through a Jew came directly from God and therefore officially made Jesus Jew free, not a Jew himself) can give birth to the very Jew free sounding “nazialismo” in a very Catholic country. “Negro” was on the same page and it was right next to "negoziare" (negotiate)! Did this mean Botswana therefore read dictionaries too?! Did this word in fact not come from the street at all but from a living room couch where a foreman by day studied words by night? I frantically started ripping through my memories, tearing the long dormant neurons open, trying to revive any old withering words of wisdom teetering on the brink of disintegration Botswana may have given me that summer, anything that may shed a deeper light on his increasingly mysterious character. Finally I found something. I remembered Botswana complaining one day about how everyone else was complaining about the pejorative undercurrents of the word black. “Black,” he said,” what it comes down to is that people are just babies and need to grow up and move beyond words already. This is boring the hell out of me. Black, you either live with it or you live under it, but we all share the same amounts of black.” “What the fuck is that supposed to mean,” I said. “It means they’re black because their sky is white. We became white because our sky was black. What’s fucking worse and more importantly, what’s the fucking difference?”

Maybe Botswana was just trying to be playful with his use of negrotiate. Maybe building houses in rich white suburbs made him feel as if he were close enough to blacks to make deprecating jokes only kin technically can. This is a mistake of course, but possibly an honest one. Once he rather clairvoyantly asked me if I knew the difference between Town Hall and the Police Station. He informed me that "one is where white people go to pay there taxes, the other is where brown people go to pay there taxes, and seeing as you have too much guinea in you to fully qualify as white, looks like you'll be paying your taxes in both." When living in New York, London seems nothing like New York. But when in Italy, I head to London for a weekend here and there when I miss the New York/London find-life-enthusiasm-and-energy-through-self-destruction approach to things that somehow works so well. From this angle, London feels like family to me. That’s why last time I was there I felt free to make a joke from stage about a friend’s band that went over like a lead balloon. “You know the next band is called ‘Dear Thief’. In Italian a thief is a ‘ladro’ which is etymologically linked to your word ‘lad’. When the Roman Emperor Hadrian was here he considered all of you lads just uncivilized ladros! He didn’t lose any battles here. He left on his own accord to return back to civilization!” Why did I make that joke? Because coming at it from this angle, from Italy, I thought New Yorkers and Londoners were brothers. I felt the freedom to make fun because I thought I was making fun of ‘us’ not 'them'. Nope.

In Botswana's corner, "bleach" and "black" both share the same root, burn it down past the amber to the embers.

-- Chris Leo


Nightmare Fantasy. I watched the Towers fall from the Pulaski Skyway as I was racing Grace, my girlfriend at the time, from my loft in Newark to her work in the City. We were late as usual and should have been on that side of the Hudson at the time of impact. Instead, we were trapped in Free America listening to the screams on the radio and watching the sky blacken from our impotent stance. We grabbed my brother and our other loft mate from home and headed to the hospital to give blood, but they weren't sure any was needed seeing as their were only casualties and survivers, nothing in between. So we headed to my parents' house in Bloomfield, long since vacated by their children a decade ago, yet our bedrooms were all still preserved and the pantry was stocked with enough booze and canned goods to get us through fall-out. As American family's get older a film forms. It becomes easier to make room for the exotic ways of a complete stanger than those of your family because you believe your family were all raised on the same fundaments and therefore minor differences feel major. In this moment nothing was unclear though, the language of the reunion with my parents and my sister was one unified thought: this was it, we all knew what we had to do. And though these first hours of World War III were getting Grace wet, I just wanted my dead Poppy's guns. Too large a part of me felt like I was born for this.
"Mom, where're the guns?"
"We went to get them last week to throw into the lake...but someone had already stolen them."
As the sun set, everyone in Essex County intuitively moved together to the highest point, Eagle Rock Reservation, and tried to formulate the next steps in their heads, no one uttered a peep. I was afraid to leave my brother and our loft mate, and knew that if my father could find a reason to martyr himself for us and the greater good at this moment he would so I really didn't want to leave, but when Grace said "Oh my god, I have to find my brother" I knew I had to take her. No phones were working, and anyhow, I knew her brother would have guns and other soldiers we could organize with.
Grace's parents lived in a pre-fab mansion in Fort Lee, an enclave of rich Korean Americans. We went there first, but when not even her ancient ama was in her rocking chair knitting or peeling garlic, we knew they must all be out looking for Grace. Her apartment was above a pizza parlour on the Bluffs in Edgewater, less than a football field from the Hudson. We went there thinking we'd find them, but even the pizza parlour was shuttered, x off another hope for guns.
Night had fallen and, despite what the people on the streets were saying, we headed for the tunnel. If a militia was forming in Midtown we wanted in. To their credit, the Port Authority police who would not let us in were also made for this moment and ushered us away with kindness and concern and assured us our roles would be better served in Free America.
What to do?
I drove my car, another relic of my dead Poppy's, to the edge of the river. Grace and I moved into the back seat. As I was lifting up her dress I kept thinking about Poppy, who spent three years of his 20's in the 40's in the Pacific, who professed that "the only good Nip was a Nip in the box" but simultaneously maintaned a loyalty to the Chinese and Koreans for their Allied support that made me think there were other stories and...was I with the same girl underneath the same bomb? When we were done I cupped my hand between her thighs and massaged anything that thought it was getting out back up in. Maybe one day Mommy would tell them about the cause the Daddy they never knew died for.
Despunked, the snowbaling toxicity was neutralized and reason gradually seeped back in occupying the vacated chambers.
No guns, no World War III, no war period, but I had to face it, I mustered up the courage and asked her if she felt the same.
"Grace, what percentage of you wants this to be the beginning of it?"
"40...maybe 50."

-- Chris Leo


Numenous thoughts can’t see the fours through the threes. Their nebulous numeric looming just as easily gives way to numinous luminescent leaps as it does to breaches with faith. Never forget, neither Darwin, nor Galileo, nor Copernicus, nor Hawking ever renounced God. It’s God’s frenzied vocal advocates that renounce them first. In fact, they like God just fine and can't for the life of them understand how thier proofs contradict anything he says. If he made anything didn't he make the numbers as well?

numbers + numinis (Latin for “Divine Will”) = continuous fractions, wherein continuous means nothing short of continually continuous

-- Chris Leo

O

An Olé is an accent added to the end of a word that takes the place of an exclamation point when fun takes precedence over imperativeness as the optimal idea to be stressed. If you’re afraid “Do it!” may come across as stricter than intended, Do it' may better communicate the gusto and encouragement you seek to bestow. But be aware, the Olé changes the pronunciation of the word as well; in this case, doo eet. A useful tool in recipes, it strikes the zestful balance between bland and intimidating: castor oil, castor oil', castor oil! or borscht, borscht', borscht! As an enemy of the mundane: laundry, laundry', laundry! Or brush my teeth, brush my teethes', or brush my teeth! Or for compounding force as a combination, try: shopping, shopping', shopping!

-- Chris Leo


Ovation needs more aviation and less uovation, though I do believe the situation is hopeless. If an innovation is something new, then the word used to describe something opposing new shouldn't itself be new, should it? No, we should pick one out of antiquity trash for that. For a minute, "ininnovation" was tossed about to describe something newly created that serves to fight evolution, not foster it. Once the masochists and disciples got a hold of the idea though, the clunky word mutated to a slipperier "sinnovation", but that sounds like a seductive whisper from a commercial selling indulgent lingerie laced chocolate liqueur or effervescent bath salts, not actually a tool of entropy. The incredible thing is, it was this same said divine providence that created "sinnovation" that then destroyed it, paving way for the correct old word to assume the spot! Listen, if Jesus really saves, why can't he write a good song? I'll tell you why -- because his children play Ovation guitars. The guitar can't be cleaned up. It's been dirty forever. It's been dirty since the Moors. It's been dirty since someone decided to call its ancestor a liar or a lyre or however we deem the proper way to translate Greek into English is. The point is, there is no place for a guitar in church -- not even if it's a new creation with a curved plastic shell and multiple mini soundholes by a company called Ovation. Therefore, we shall use an old word to descibe this new thing that's only bringing us backwards. Ovation. When I began to compile my list of other examples of ovations to clarify matters for you, I was interupted by a punk who claimed "all things are ovations, tool" and as hard as I tried to get back on track, my arguments were lost.

Innovation - inn = something to sit and disovate frantically for

-- Chris Leo


Overneath can be a small error like climbing into bed above the sheets but under the blankets, a mild sensation experienced when you’ve been scuba diving for too long and lose a sense of up, the itchy separation of skin from the body after a severe sunburn, or one wild wild ride when, no matter what words you string together, everything seems to fit. “I…am…whelming…from…overstanding...need…to…get…neath.”

-- Chris Leo

P

"Is he pace (pah-chay) or just Mediterranean?" is International English slang that developed to navigate around a delicate question New World women have difficulty deciphering. Ashley wanted Cosimo, but everytime she saw him out he was surrounded by eight other men, often leaning on each other with arms embraced. When she finally got the courage to approach the gang with the guise of a need for language tutoring, it's true that Cosimo did jump at the offer to help -- but only after he kissed all his friends goodbye, twice! Hmmm. Then, as Ashley and Cosimo were finishing their cafe's during her "tutoring", Cosimo's friend Gian Luca zipped up on his Vespa waving a rainbow flag across which read "pace", Italian for "peace", because he was on his way to the manifestation in piazza maggiore. Cosimo pecked Ashley on the cheek, hopped on the back of Gian Lu's bike, grabbed his waist and off they went.

-- Chris Leo


Put passassinate into the same category as “conversate” and “irregardless” as words that only the slickest litigators have succeeded in convincing us should rightfully exist. I’ve heard “irregardless” (as opposed to the more economic “regardless”) advocated for as a way to stress a serious laissez-faire ‘tude, like girregardless (giro for "spin"). Like “However many ways this spins style-double-triple-quadruple-double-trip-triple–whatever-whenever-on-off, irregardless I am with you”. “Conversate” (as opposed to “converse”) is said to be a conversation on either the verge of argument or a conversation when only one person is pontificating and hence the staccato “ate” ending rather than the smoother “erse” (aint 'nem erses smooth?). When someone says “We’re just conversating” don’t believe them. It means things are about to heat up. Fine. “Passassinate”, “passion” + “assassinate”, is a mixture of love and rage at the same time. Great, this is an important concept. The problem is that passion once already encompassed both ideas. Though the Proto-Indo-European root pei meant simply “to hurt”, when the Romans got a hold of it, acting as Romans did, they threw some love in and gave us fodder for a million novels. The Passion of Christ is a remnant of this middle passage of “passion”. You can still feel the pain in it though, can’t you? So what to do? Rehabilitate the rage in passion or keep splintering these words into ever smaller and smaller nuances? River Plates leans on the side of accepting all words and remaining patient while they settle in or drop out. In the case of “passion” versus “passassinate”, though both words embrace the same concepts, the balance of concepts within each word differs slightly: love is the primary part of “passion”, whereas pure physicality outweighs the love in “passassinate”. For example, one could not say, “I have an intense passion for your tits.” One could however say, “Mmm girl, you leave me with no other option but to passassinate that ass like only a buttcher could. Diddy-blau!” See the inarrabato entry for a compromise between the two terms that's struck an even balance between all elements at hand.

-- Chris Leo


Paza, “crazies for peace on earth”, is a bityrrhenic Believer in both sound and Sight. It arrived in Spain with the Roman legionnaires who lived a life of total war. For them a pazza dia (“crazy” in Italian like “Potsie” from Happy Days +“day” in Spanish) was a day without fighting. These dates were so rare indeed that the gracing of one came with the exclamatory toast which in due time transubstantiated itself to “paz dio!” (“peaceful god” in Spanish). But as great parties only begat greater parties, “paz dio!” found it’s place at the banquet every night as demagogues enlivened through demitasse imbibing whether a battle was fought that day or not. By the time of the Inquisition, “paz dio!”, losing all semblance of its initial peace, had become but a godless rallying cry for pain, and hence, with its reintroduction to Italy across the Tyrrhenian it approached its former form again as the dreadfilled on the shores learned to fear the crucifix atop the cruzieros, “Paza!”

The good news is that the Paza bring with them excellent words since everything is a sign from God. For example, though the Latin word sonare ("to sound") was used for playing the guitar in Italy, it was the Latin word tocare ("to touch") that took root in Spain because the possessed performers appeared "touched". Or "loco" (Spanish for "crazy") has duel competing religious etymologies, having either come directly from the Latin "loco" for "of a place" (as in, of this world, not godly) or as a word turned back upon the Moors with their own Arabic "lauqa" for "fool, maniac".

Putz once meant “shiney jewelry” to Yiddish speaking Jews, but through the Paza rich past it’s lost its luster. In general, luster is something one loses and "puzza" in Italian is "stink".

-- Chris Leo


Peninsulating, from the Latin paeninsula for “almost an island”, brings with it none of the drastic reactions properly isolating, insulating, or insulting someone can. Depending on one’s degree of pessimism or optimism, peninsulation either gradually and subtly kills the soul or finally puts one at peace away from the races. Whereas continents are thought to be “held together” (from the Latin con + tinere) we all know the daily struggle threatens to break us apart. On the other hand, the extreme tranquility of islands tends to implode upon itself and freak out (think Manhattan, Jamaica, Haiti, Puerto Rico, Montreal, Ibiza, England, etc) when not lounging. A peninsula however keeps one feeling connected but not bound. Days, weeks, years fly by on the peninsula and rarely does something feel missed. While you spent hours climbing up that palm tree to grab the coconut, finding a method to open it, and debating what booze to fill it with in Baja did it cross your mind that opportunities might be dissolving up in Los Angeles? Nope, in fact you felt closer there than you did the weekend you spent in Santa Catalina. And while you read your morning paper about the news from Den Haag on the terrazzo in Taranto (on a peninsula in a peninsula on a gulf in a sea!) do you remember feeling either eager to get back or anxious to get away? Neither. On the beach in Miami I saw an old New York Jew who came down to die and a new Colombian getting set to make his mark and all the peninsulating left me feeling absolutely anachronistic.

-- Chris Leo


peripathetic is the frustration the ADHD mind suffers due to the cogs of his head being powered by the pounding of his feet. His thoughts are generated in bursts during movement and instantly dissolved in cessation. Like a hummingbird, his is a life of only sweet nectar and asymmetrical flight juxtaposed by narcoleptic comas with no gears in between to jot it all down. The peripathetic is the Buddha Lin Chi tells us to kill when we meet him on the road.

-- Chris Leo


Philosovy is pontificated by philosoniks in a distanced manner that no matter how much you may agree with the meat of their fiery rhetoric finds you still looking for reasons to disagree because philosovy is just so annoying, so out of touch. Philosovers know not how to shit-shoot with those they advocate for nor even their best friends because when personal exposure is at risk this whole studied safety net threatens to unwind. We are talking about big issues here workers, big big issues that deal with many many people at a clip; if we stop to think about each and every person the manifestation and blanketed anger won’t make any sense and we’ll be left with no “no’s” to rally behind. What street will we parade down then? We are looking to place blame and drench pity and those words dissolve away when the microscope appears. No, philosovers prefer to keep the issues at arms length barraging their tutorials directly from the podium, not the bar stool (whether in substance it be or not be a bar stool) when you just came looking for deeper things to get into like “what’s up?” or “how are things with you and Claudia?” Claudia? How can we think about Claudia singular at a time like this when Claudia plural needs our patronage, comrade?

philosophy + Soviet = if only I could clone me a drove you’d march as my Samaritan and newspeak my savage shortcomings into “cultural”, and Claudia would thank you when you pulled her hair as is the custom of the proud and ancient society of 1081 1st Ave, apt #2C, NYC, NY 10021

-- Chris Leo


Pompieno and pompigro are related calls of distress that if go unabused, seconded by River Plates, deserve your benevolent hands in rescue. An appeal for “pompieno”, from “pompino” (Italian slang for “fellatio”, literally "the pump") + “pieno” (“full” in Italian), comes after a man forgetting to first empty out enters into a dinner date randied already and finding himself unable to control his fretful nerves during the course of the meal, overeats at the table and loses the drive he raced into it with. The larger problem is, this demanding desire remains behind sans drive and puppy dog eyes seek pity in the form of a little pompieno so the anguished can sleep tight. Have pity on him, his well intentioned though feigned attempt at civilization for you was what got him into this mess. A plea for “pompigro”, “pompino” + “pigro” (Italian for “lazy”) after a full day at work when everything is backed up and trying to come out at once also often finds some merit to collapse on. We say the order to properly prep this body for a peaceful night ahead should follow like this: shit, snack, pompigro, nap.

-- Chris Leo


Postres, "dessert" in Spanish, are (naturally) felt embossed posters that captivate stoners in a black light haze, i.e. "sweeeeeet".

-- Chris Leo


Praphetic. When the passing of the Sun, Venus, and Jupiter inside an aphetic place happen at once new life is brought to all. An aphetic word arrives at our lips sans the sound of the first syllable or letter, yet it doles rather the tools of death! Through cover of a ghosted vowel, only an owl's made aware of the furtiveness of the fledgling (e)squire. If successful in his siege, his (k)nife will have cleaved, the victim deceived mistook (a)cute for the cute of youth, and he (e)vanishes without a clue. Tomorrow a banquet will be held and if the (e)bishop(os) is pleased (k)nighthood will be his!

pro + aphetic = the Prophet of the last breath before new life

-- Chris Leo


Precrastination is an efficient tool in assuring everything you need to get done today gets done. First, prepare the daily list you have little faith in daily. Second, make the opposing list of everything else you can do today to avoid list one. Third, throw list one out. Fourth, stare pavlovically at the ingrained weight of the only list left, list two, and watch as list one takes flight while you procrastinate beginning list two (henceforth thought of simply as "the list"). Fifth, don’t get stuck thinking of this definition as a recrastination because it is not – look, I am out of here before this paragraph has barely begun.

precrastination = make sure “meet Juan for mojitos” makes both lists

-- Chris Leo


Prepositional or conjunctive people have found the key and it was right under our noses. By swapping the given words in positions they’re normally expected to be found with other idiomatic conjunctives, the arbitrary fabric of everything is revealed. As linguist Marco Barone says, “When I asked what’s the why it fucked out and cheersed me 'round.” To fulfill an unwritten chapter of my own bio I took a job as a cook in an upscale restaurant in Gramercy Park. Late one night when us cooks accidentally bumped into the waitstaff at a nearby nightclub someone’s drunk gnosis caught the joy in my eye as I watched the two antagonistic groups awkwardly socialize with each other. “You are neither hanging-out nor studying-up, you’re just a speye hanging-up and studying-out!” “How gives?” I pleaded, “You put me all wrong.”

-- Chris Leo


Prodigal is the act of Proto-Indo-European words returning home. No one's sure exactly when it was they left the Indus Valley and only some can still recall a vague idea of how they appeared epochs ago in their youth, but one thing is certain, they've both grown and been bruised magnificently along this odyssey. The semantical mistake is to view these prodigal paroles as American words invading European sentences when in fact this oversimplifies the intercourse. For example, when "blowout sale" appears on shop windows in Oslo, street vendors sell "hot dogs" in Paris, and Italians watch "films" on Saturday evenings, near-sightedness often has critics believing these words spontaneously generated in the New World and now threaten to contaminate purer tongues abroad. As proud and pompous as Americans may be though, it is only the rare rogue scientist once a century who takes credit for spontaneosly generating anything at all. In fact, long ago these words set out on caravan, canoe, camel, campaign, car, train, plane; through Persia, Greece, Rome, Tokyo, and Winnipeg; through rain, wind, battles, beds, maniacs' heads, and ponderous pens. Every land they left was once a land they arrived in new. Yes, they've changed, of course they've changed, but the important thing is that they, better late than never, are beginning to return home. Welcome them back! Slaughter the fattened lamb! And celebrate! Celebrate them today because soon enough they too will give way to new words of their own who will then part these parts in search of adventure, ambition, appetite, and wishing.

-- Chris Leo

Q

Qwail is always written with a capital Q to illustrate the pin in the balloon piercing from the wailing of the quail. When a man Qwails he shrieks like a woman when we expected a whale. When a woman Qwails barn animals frenzy, windows shatter, and men’s hair bristles though the register doesn’t register. Depending on type of terror induced, there are Blue-Breasted Qwails, Jungle-Bush Qwails, Brown Qwails, Himalayan Qwails, the Rain Qwail, and the Balkans are even home to a misery reliant/redundant/relegated Common Qwail.

-- Chris Leo

R

Redate. Thank god New York City can’t get it through its head that it isn’t a village, it's for this you always get a second shot at bumping into the same people twice. And in accordance with the ways of the piccolo paese, the provincialism keeps these townsfolk here, which means it may take eight years to bump into Sue Kim again, but eight years may also be exactly what you needed. Christ, how many sleepless nights did I torture myself for asking Sue “so what you doing later what you doing later?” seven times in the span of six minutes at that shit hole on the Bowery? “You already asked me that and I said ‘I dunno, what are you doing later?’” And my god how lonely must our gigantic village be for “Um, uh, I want to go to your place, how ‘bout now?” to have worked! Sue Kim and I ate face in the back of a cab while the sect Sikh kept tapping the glass divider so we’d get the hint to keep it secco. The stairwell to her apartment on Hester and Allen turned out to be where all the hairs of the world go when you flush them down the sink and made comfortable nests for the Beetlenut pits the Chinese chewed and the spat out as receptacles to cling the phlegm to as it lunged from their lungs between shouts. And as embarrassing as my clumsy approach to that bed was, I’m still dying to know who told Sue Kim moving up and down like a frog on its back out of water created any sort of refuge for a penis. Ooh and even now I get the shivers when it comes to me in burning awkward waves just how naïve I was the following morning when I asked from bed “So let’s go to a museum today, yeah?” When she failed to respond I kissed her on her cheek and she rolled back away under the covers. I slipped my clothes on, left the dirty socks at hers, and wandered slowly across the bridge back to mine making sure I had enough time to convince myself it was in fact fun before crashing in my own. Fast forward eight years ahead to a different Bowery, different wallet, and different us above the same soil in a hotel lounge where thank god this booze has pickled us eternally in our youth because, “Sue Kim, is that thee Sue Kim from Hester and Allen?” “I still live there, and wait ‘till you see the place now!”
“Well that didn’t take very long did it Sue?” “We have some doors to close my friend, don’t we?” Patience joined us in the cab, the Chinese neighbors had become New Yorkers, the frog became a bronco, and I slipped out without a clue in the morning according to cue.

-- Simon Henderson, Chris Leo


Rescovered is a vox super voltus, from the Latin for “overlooked words”. A VSV is a word whose existence (or lack there of) baffles most other River Plate definitions. While the bulk of the River Plate words are currently vying for validation between languages, rescovered is a word that could have very logically happened right at the heart of several Latin based languages, but somehow didn’t. Is River Plates the first to discover rescover? Doubtful. It seems unlikely this word could’ve slipped past the masses so close to "recover" since time immemorial, yet something about it makes it just not stick. Instead, we say “rediscovered”, thereby (seemingly) awkwardly prefixing a prefix with “re” + “dis”. One theory is that this is in fact not the case, that rediscovered is an odd combination of the Old Frisian “rede”, from where we get “ready”, joined to the Late Latin “scoperire” for “uncover”. The idea being that when something is uncovered a second time it is now officially ready. Think in terms of art, there's the avant garde and then there's the generation who copies the avant garde afterwards who reap the spoils of success. The populous is now ready only because it’s been partially digested already. Amongst ascetics there's the practice of drinking one’s own urine because many of the nutrients inside are now more readily available as they too have been partially broken down. Some think “religion” comes from the Latin “re” (again) + “legere” (to read). Again, there is this sense that when something is visited a second time it becomes something entirely different. Perhaps it is for this reason rescovered has remained a vox super voltus. Or perhaps it's because when you return to things a second time "different" does not always mean better; sometimes they are simply covered in the residue of leftovers, or rescovered.

-- Chris Leo


Resurrexit. L’espirit de l’escalier (the spirit of the stairs) is a French idiom for realizing the perfect comeback seconds too late. The idea being that one always seems to hit on the way down the stairwell of the house you just stormed out of. Resurrexit though is the American idea that it’s never too late. No, you storm right back up those stairs and give it to him girl. “And furthermore, this cur-ious quest for words you’ve embarked on is not only about the most unsexiest thing ever, but it’s also truly one failed endless attempt at rationalizing your juvenile and perverted core,” she resurrexited. “You can’t be juvenile and perverted at the same time,” I mumbled under my breath. “That just was!” she said as she attempted a fleeing once more. Well I let the door slam, opened it while she was racing down the stairs hoping for another l’espirit de l’escalier to hit, and filled in that space with my own words instead. I had to secure an end to more possible reresurrexits. “Run all you want Ahab, but I know you’ll never be through with my big white mobile dick, oh!” No no, in fact she was.

-- Chris Leo


Rich Linklater is an American troppopomo eponym. It’s a shame American English recycles its eponyms in time for the droll headlines of tomorrow because some of the greatest British words still in use today come from long forgotten namesakes, of both the great and ultra ordinary. Yes, it’s overly romantic to believe that every time someone says “guy” the residue of failed incendiary Guy Fawkes who tried to blow up Parliament and from whence we get the pronoun “guy” is felt, but the idea that it is not still felt may be just as romantic. Richard Linklater directed the films Slackers and Dazed and Confused, which is already enough to make his name both synonymous with and archetypal of troppopomism. Since then it’s also become a code for excluding an unwanted third party from the hang. “Henry, I heard Rich Linklater claims the new 4:20 is quatre-vingt, whadda you think?” means “Henry, let’s ditch for a drink later and link back up at 8, what say ye?” Or “I dunno, I think I’ll just go home tonight and pass out watching a Linklater on pay-per-view” means “I dunno, how 'bout we meet for a drink later and pass around the paper dude?”

-- Giorgio Grappi, Chris Leo


Ricottage is cheezy to the nth exponential; it is cheeze cheezed. While Italians claim “ricotto” means “recooked”, the English claim “cottage” implies something homemade, and the Scottish are still complaining that someone not only dropped the ‘s’ off the beginning but ceased frying it as well, the impartial eye knowingly senses that both cheeses’ curd-like wet consistency makes them obvious relatives. Regardless (though the Italians are probably most right), fortunately there is a France between that allows us to hear the “age” as the “related to, belonging to” we need. Being therefore cheezishly cheesy, ricottage isn't just cheezy, it's prepackaged manufactured cheeze you've already tasted before.
-- Chris Leo


Ridiculo is the humiliating final argument of a debate. If the points from the other side of the table have become so lowly and loose that proper oral rebuttal need no longer be honored, a well ripped ridiculo combined with a noncapitulating stare will leave you as triumphant as the trumpet you just blared and them as flat as the flatulence declared.

ridi ("you laugh" in Italian) + culo ("ass" in Italian) = ridicule through ass laughing.

-- Chris Leo


Rockognized. I dusted off my guitar and took it in for a set-up to get ready for a Van Pelt reunion show at SXSW.
"Does the 'VP' spray-painted on your case mean 'Van Pelt'?"
"Uhh...well yes. You remember us?"
"Oh yeah, oooh yeah, awwwwzzzzmmm."
And next thing I knew warm Santa Anna winds had blown down the Februarily frigid Ludlow Street wafting the doors of the shop open! In rode Rick Rubin who desparately needed to know where he could find that Van Pelt/Radio to Saturn split 7" with the hand-screened sleeves and the clerk from the Princeton Record Exchange was right in toe reminiscing about the one month run our "Sultans of Sentiment" album had on the "staff picks" rack back in '96 and followed that with "yeah, but I always thought your sister was the most talented member of your clan, but how's your Cousin Johnny doin' anyhow?". The yellow bricks of Santa Monica kept a rolling all the way through the store down the back staircase into the basement where the guitar tech actually slapped my hand and patted my back and said he knew I'd "need some subtle action so the strings could breathe a bit"! I fielded a million more questions on my way out the store about the bloody pick-ups on Brian's telecaster, Neil's spearheading of the mallet movement when everyone else was using shakers, and Sean's foray's in my other brother's bands.

When I returned the next week to pick up my guitar I was sure to bring my girlfriend along in case she needed a little reminder of my long dormant but still utter dopeness. I dragged her through the snow expecting to show off prints of my hands in a concrete slab on Ludlow, but instead arrived to an empty store without a single similar face, found my guitar in a pile of a million other guitars with spray-painted monograms on their cases too, was informed that in fact my neck was not mahogany but a bizarre polymer concoted in Delaware and that "sometimes cheap gits like that are fun to kick around with". Upon receiving the bill I turned to gf and asked her what pixie put the "poor" in the "porridge" we'd be eating tonight and "do you like sloe gin? Because I think there might be a bottle of it tucked deep deep into the pantry we could eek a little alcohol out of yet".

-- Chris Leo

S

Satisfucked. Two ways to kill your man.
a) Never give it up.
b) Dedicate a day to the bed, breaking from the four times a week statusfactory routine, and make him say, "Basta, basta...I...am...satisfucked."

-- Laura Marchetti


Seeling boat. It is true from time to time that River Plates may sink into the depths of immaturity, but it’s only because we believe these depths to be healthy balancing exercises and as equally academically risky as the obscure cemented entanglements our scholarly pursuits often lead us down. It’s not to say though we believe that between both extremes there is a truth of sorts; in fact, it’s rather the opposite. When presented with two margins, yes of course a middle is birthed, but further depths and further heights beyond the walls we pushed apart now also materialize only as a result of the presentation of these walls. There are lows beyond our lows and heights beyond our heights that may not have emerged otherwise had we not accepted words like “hinis” and “traubocare” earlier to form arbitrary margins with which to then break from. In this case, it's the fantastic seeling boat that was sailing beyond the margins when we caught it.

Laura and I took the overly precocious seven-year-old Anna Paula, daughter of another Italo-American couple friends of ours, up to Lago di Garda on a recent Sunday to give her young parents a much needed break. “Look at the lake! See the sea! Look at the lake! See the sea!” may seem like obvious child’s wordplay from Anna Paula, but when she followed it with “Mira…il mare!” I started to think maybe she was on to something. First, on a side note, everyone should learn Spanish through Italian ears. Both phonetically and etymologically the playful richness of the Spanish language comes across like bricks when approaching it from this end. For example, “mira” is “to look” in Spanish, but did it come from “ammirare”, Italian for “admire”, or “mirare”, Italian for “take aim”? Was every sight to the Roman legionnaires stationed in Iberia something to long for or shoot for? Either way it’s beautiful. I challenged Anna Paula with, “Yo! Let’s go for a short walk along the lungolago” and she was hot on my heels with “Or why not a long walk along the cortocosta, nananana? Or we could just go sealing?” This is when Laura stepped in. Laura speaks six languages better than I speak one because she accepts the current structures, learns them as they’re taught, and breaks from form only after everything is rote. I instead have taken nothing for granted, question every construct at every turn, and have been left therefore with only a vague web that binds all Western languages together but an inability to be understood clearly in even my own mother tongue. This is all to say that Laura corrected Anna Paula where I never would have.
“Anna, it’s a 'sail boat', not a 'seal', 'see', or 'sea boat'. They’re all different things.”
“No they’re not. How could they all be different when they’re talking about the same thing?”
“Are you sure they’re talking about the same thing, Anna?”
“Of course they are. The sea is wide open so you can see everything.”
“Haha, Anna you might be right, but the word is actually 'sailing', not 'sealing'.”
“That’s just a mistake Laura. It’s like an accent.”
This is when I jumped in on Anna’s side. I should really never do this. Anna doesn’t need my help and Laura hates my skepticism.
“I’m with Anna, Laura. ‘Sail’ comes from the Proto-Indo-European sek which means ‘to cut’ because it’s from a cut piece of cloth that cuts your open vision. It’s the same as your Italian word for sail ‘vela’ for ‘something woven’. This is where we get 'veil' from. Both veil and vela cut your veda (Italian conjunctive for ‘see’), no?”
“You two are speaking about history and I’m speaking about right now. It’s a sail boat Chris and she needs to know that.”

I’m still not sure Laura was right. “Sky” comes from the Proto-Indo-European skeu which meant “to conceal, to cover.” The Italian word for sky is “cielo” which is very close to “cieco” which means “blind”. Of the 48 constellations Ptolemy proposed only one has been officially unrecognised, Argo Navis. Why? Because it was a sail boat of course and there is no seeing in the blind night's sky.

-- Chris Leo


Shredability is a persevering faccident. Whether faccident comes from "fact" + "accident", "facile" (It. "easy") + "accident", or "facile + "dente" (due to its easy birth from between the teeth) is unclear. It is clear, however, that its birth most likely happened many times in varying vans and offices by sheer fate. The addition of the humiliating "sh" before credibility created a slick back door for white collor crooks and a quick entrance for licks with hooks, i.e. "Though I haven't actually heard Lloyd rip, when one's shredability is backed by the bartender from the Cedar Inn on Rt. 46, Zorn's custom string winder in Colombus, and both Cousin Sam and Karen, I already know he's my axe! Not to mention holmes only records on 2-inch tape, which only serves to bolster his claims at divination."

shred + credability = shredability, sight unheard

-- Kiernan Moriarty, Chris Leo


Shyena is a yoga instructor. Now and then he plays the humble bass. His clothes are functional and frumpy. His manner is frail and chumpy. They call him for coffee not drinks. At Ikea he recommends sinks. His cautionary papa's "y'know..." creates the link to slip his greasy sleezy male-traitorous arm right between the chinks and he is in and you are out.

shy + hyena = shyena, the sneaky weasel

-- Chris Leo


Snoupin’, it is true, falls in the same family as all things “souper”, but luckily never the twain shall meet. There are those who enjoy one type of souper sandwich deal, and there are those that enjoy the other. “The other” in this case is the perpetual dilemma of the dandied thief. Our hungry but flirty thief, dressed in the finest threads plucked from where last he laid his head, walks into the supermarket to lift a lunch and checks out the check-out girl on his lurch. Seeing as she is after all a check-out girl, he knows their wallets are of an equally famous famine and therefore his initial glance will account for more than just a fighting chance. This poses a problem: absconding relies on obscurity. The compromise reached to avoid complete defeat weakens one wad while widening the other. She’s spotted him, he cannot steal. She’s spotted him, nor can he peel out. This leaves only one option – buy the soup, steal the sandwich. Where does the sandwich go? No worries, she’ll be too shy to look, but too impressed not to see it.

Snoopin’ for soup = money saved for the happy hour needed to calm the nerves fried in the scoupin'

-- Chris Leo


Strawberry. Like a volcano on top of a fault line, there're simultaneous expulsions and implosions happening in Milan that're paving the way of the next linguistic subduction tectonic. Italians are strict with keeping the Italian language proper and uniform. They have to be. Prior to WWII most Italians spoke mainly their own local dialects of which there are an infinitesimal amount and of which many can be considered languages in their own right. To unify the country, tv, radio, and schools set out on a massive initiative in the 1950’s to teach proper Italian to the entire country and it worked. Now, if you wanna break the language rules, do it in a vivid dialect. If you want to make sure your point is clear, make it in Italian. This means that the Italian language is a lingua franca even to Italians; their own dialects are still their mother tongues. It needed to happen this way just like English needed to be free, but maybe this is all about to change? As English spreads across the globe (I'm putting my money down on even the Chinese speaking English before we speak Chinese), there may be a valid call to form a proper monitoring body like the Forty Immortals to keep at least one brand of English uniform, while on the flip side the country of Italy becomes more and more connected to its once distant villages the need for a proper Italian may wane and the rules could become simply suggestions as they already are in dialects.

Enter Milan (more than Rome, which is still in large part a city of Romans) as the epicenter where all Italians from all dialects clash. Every now and then a word from a dialect reaches Milan and becomes a star, scattered out across the rest of Italy via the Milan portal. For example, the mysterious Sicilian word for "cock", "minchia", was disseminated across the boot only after passing through Milan first. More commonly though, too many differing dialects force the newcomers to speak the national lingua franca of Italian proper (which by nature of being restrained and constricted is something they consider duller than the dialects) rather than their individual dialects. Naturally, this gives way to the implosion wherein the lingua franca slackens loose letting the life in.

While explaining peligrassa to a Milanese friend, he in turn described to me through some intensely exquisite writhing about the “so-good-it-hurt-man” strawberry he received from a peligrassa last week. Now we know Italians love food, especially le peligrasse, but enjoying a strawberry to such an extent seemed like a put on. I asked him to elaborate. Milan, being so close to borders with France and Switzerland, knows its linguistic shit so I knew he could. He began with the equus.
“Hey man, you know what happened to the equus?”
“You mean the horse?”
“To you guys a horse yeah -- which is wrong because horse is our word for bear, orso; somehow you guys fucked that one up along the way – but equus yeah, after Cesar spent seven long years fighting the French our proud equui returned destroyed cavalli! See, the Gauls had a word for nag, an old horse, that sounded like caballus to the Roman ear. The Romans then took up the word in replacement of 'equus' due to the sorry state of their once strapping horses. By the time they returned to Rome they were calling all horses 'cavalli', which was then exported back to France as 'cheval'. Good shit, neh?”
“Yes. Great shit, but your painfully marvelous strawberry my friend?
“Right, so along those lines, no one can really say why you guys call strawberries ‘strawberries’, right? There are theories, yeah, but none of them seem tight. Same for us. They think our word 'fragola' may have come from ‘fragrante’, the fragrant fruit, but no one really knows. All we know for sure is that we took our word from the French ‘fraise’ and turned it into ‘fragola’, which if you were to translate literally into Italian is ‘between the throat’('fra' + 'gola'). No one really knows anything about it why it tastes so good. So when we say ‘strawberry’ what we mean to say is that that peligrassa from last week put it ‘between her throat’ and I have no idea why it felt so so so fucking grand and I certainly didn't see it coming so yeah let's keep the mystery intact by keeping the mysterious thread in motion, fragola becomes strawberry and sex is saved yet another day!”

-- Chris Leo


Woe the sudent who returns home to find he’s also a stupent. The effete northerners with their biting wit, prudent lovers, intellects that conquer joy, and vacation houses in coves only further north wish these sudents would just stay in the south where it’s permissible to visit the same questions more than once, like “why do sunsets on beaches with half naked people rule?”, “why is moving back and forth in six inch strokes all it takes to stop time?” and “Why does food taste so much better when I plucked it from my own garden?” The nerdern shhhtudents have things to do, places to go, progresses to make that keep them having things to do, books to read, lists to render new lists. These sudents only slow things down. Eventually the sudent gets it. The nerderner is right. Home -- where the friends, family, sun, and olives grow -- is better. But it’s too late! In the eyes of the paesani the sudent abandoned them for uppity pursuits, ungrateful stupent twit. He will never fit in in the north, yet the south is no longer his home either. Thank god both northern and southern chicks dig his maverick ways and he can at least reap all the benefits of denting like a stud.

-- Chris Leo


Suislide. Little by little, drip by dram, bringing it on, when it comes it comes. So why were they passed over? I mean yes, they weren't the best band in the world but they were still better than every other band that soared into the magazines. It must have something to do with timing. These guys weren't making music for this time, which is weird because as people they fell nothing short of gurus of the present tense, whereas the bands making now music never seem to be here, they always seem a bit ahead plotting bigger and better things. Thing is, if you could catch a fix on the eyes of the the better band you could see just how squished they felt between their unusually frighteningly weighty pasts and futures leaving them nowhere else to go other than ultra here now. Weird though, because that didn't translate to the music. I tried telling their singer, "Dave, your timing is off. The bands people listen to are either playing music that's for right now, or music that exists outside of time and hence timeless. Either engage time or turn your back on it. Your music is in front of time, maybe guiding a path for others to perfect when the timing syncs up, but not delivering what they need now. You gotta put your foot down in one camp or another, man. Listen, I know you wouldn't even know how to dumb it down so that leaves you with only one choice: heroin. You've gotta shoot it. Not smoke it, the full deal, needles. Heroin takes you out of time and out of time is where you'll find your monuments, Dave. History has proven this." "Yeah, but that's suicide. Making music for no time makes your own time here limited", he said before suisliding away to the bar to order a gin and tonic with a tequila chaser in search of that smile ever on the brink.

-- Chris Leo

T

Temporary friends or slow learners are words that share both a related meaning and a similar sound, but despite all painstaking efforts no linguist has yet been able to unearth matching roots. In fact, it seems these words have nothing to do with each other. Grange and range, farm and pharmacy, parochialism and paraocchi (Italian, "blinders horses wear to keep them looking straight"), warlock and war, hear and ear, lacerate and lachrymose, jewel and Jew, "more or less" (indicating flexibility) and moralless, sol and soul, friend and fiend (you know what I mean amica my nemica?), Jesus and Zeus, Erinys and Erin, woman and womb, noise and annoy, are all examples of temporary friends. The couplets may be working in tandem with each other now, and hence have come to look and sound the same (as friends often do), but whether they are actually cut from the same stone is a matter hotly debated. For example, though the healthiest pharmaceuticals may currently come from the farm, though Jews may be major players in the jewelry trade, and though the Irish in Erin run hot blooded like Erinyus, this is not to say things always were or will be this way. The optimistic etymologist calls temporary friends "slow learners" instead because he believes these words are in fact inherently related and, like twins separated at birth, have just taken some time to reunite. A strong case made by the believers of slow learners (over temporary friends) is that currently Western etymology can only go as far back as Proto-Indo-European (and even our reconstruction of that is wanting). These linguists propose that if we were to go back even further we might find these slow learners in fact intact with the similar sounds and roots missing now. Following this train of thought, we may also find other words once believed to be from the same Proto-Indo-European root to have different paths before. Like prodigals, the coming-of-age transformations of slow learners is a never ending saga.

Sissy = one who says yes to anyone and everything, a "si si"-er.

-- Chris Leo


Tonigh first seemed like one last desperate attempt to preserve the old English spellings from the rapid transformations text-messaging is tearing into our language, but after sitting with it for a bit I've become a full convert now. Noah Webster, linguistic American patriot, removed as many 'u's from American English as possible to distance our breed of English from the Queen's. Now it is the kids of the UK themselves who haven't got time for extraneous 'u's while ripping out texts -- when "International English" takes root for good, it may be the impatient phoenetics of text messaging that lays the law.

I received a "meet tonigh?" text-message from the sometimes River Plate's contributor, Giorgio Grappi, and in keeping with my typical immature character responded with "Tonigh? Non so, but c u 2nite for sure". Then before heading out for the night I gave my email a final safety check and found quite an intelligent escape rebuttal from Giorgio, proof that spite and the rewriting of history (because this is obviously a dodging lie) can on occasion work for the greater good: "Chris, when I said 'tonigh' I thought you of all people would know I meant 'to + nigh' and understand that I was inventing a time frame between the evening and the night -- the nigh, as in near, night. See you in the nigh night? Baci".

-- Giorgio Grappi, Chris Leo


Traubocare, the autooverbrimming induced from wine drunk, has several feasible roots, though “trauben” (“grape” in German) + “trabocare” (“overflow” in Italian) is the most likely. “Trans” or “trauma” + “bocare” (“to mouth” in Italian) or “karo” (“to care for” in Proto Germanic) also form arguable cases. The theory for the first is that the inexperienced ears of Roman legionnaires in Germanic posts would confuse “trauben” for “trocknen” (“hard, strong” in German) when attempting to order wine in a land of beer and malts and therefore receive an unsuspectingly fortified glass at their table instead. In the idioms of inebriation, most languages have words like traubocare that accurately describe the spinning state as one of movement. “He’s on his wayn” (from the Ethiopian word for “wine”) is the stage right before that tipping point. “He’s gone mad”, drawing from the Proto-Indo-European meaning of mad as “wet, dripping” was once common in Middle England and even now still intuitively appears when one’s had too much. Similar is the South African “He’s off to Soweto” which takes the South West Townships acronym apart and restresses it to sound out so wet o. “Shebeen here, but now she’s gone” comes from the Irish “seibin” (“small mug”) and is another way of saying “she’s talking to the spirits”. One who stagnates in Newyorkese wastes a night getting wet (from the Proto-Indo-European stag for “dripping”) with the boys solely for shits and giggles. It’s common knowledge that “three sheets to the wind” means someone is so far “out to sea” they’ve already hoisted their third mast, but what many don’t realize is that the “mast” metaphor precedes the sheet metaphor (consistent with the chronology of a healthy night) and was brought back by British sailors returning from India. “Mast” in Urdu means “intoxicated like a frenzied male elephant in heat”. One theory on the root of “testes” has it coming from the Greek “parastatai” which were twin supports for a ships mast. If this therefore renders a “mast” a “booze provoked hard-on”, every woman should have a right to administer “litmast” tests before committing. The "lit" from "litmus" comes from the Middle Dutch “liken”, which unsurprising means “to drip”.

-- Chris Leo


A Triscussion takes place when a person involved in a discussion fails at articulating her argument well yet still somehow takes the debate, as if an ethereal third voice votes in favor of a nonvolubale. Unlike discussions which break things apart (from Latin dis for "apart" + quatere for "to shake"), triscussions tie everything together. In Sardinia when four male throat singers hit a perfect pitch at once a fifth sound appears as a result of overtones. This fifth sound is believed to be the Virgin Mary come down from on High to add her approval to such faultlessness. They call her “La Quintina”, the "Fifth Lady". When I would tell the nuns “Sister, I got Jesus and I got The Father, but what’s the story with the Holy Spirit?” they’d respond with “that’s because it is impossible to understand the Holy Trinity, son.” When I complain to Laura that “potatoes are just empty carbs, can’t we eat yams instead” or “babe, you eat your cornetto con crema, but I’m opting for something with a lot less sugar and some actual vitamins” she never argues back, she simply smiles and takes the triscussion while I continue my day like a healthy frustration chafed and itchy with all sorts of reason and problems.

“tredici” is “thirteen” in Italian but translates literally to “you say three” = some things that seem like sins are in fact the holiest of them all, i.e. without Judas there would be no betrayal that lead to resurrection, and without the occasional infidelity how could I be so sure you taste so much better?

-- Marco Barone, Chris Leo


Troppocaldo is a rare and fantastic front-formation. A front-formation occurs when words are psuedo-historically elongated to expose an ancient root that in fact never existed. In the case of “troppo” (It. “too much”) + “caldo” (It. “hot”), it’s a way certain factions of the pigmentless north call things “tropical”. “Tropical” is slowed down by stretching the word out the same way they proudly pronounce “pigment” with at least two very stressed and separate syllables, “pig” + “ment” (“pig” + “men” + “t!” has been known to follow if the southern man brought some heat along north). In one element and one element alone they remind us, “tropical” needs to be slowed down and stretched out.

troppocaldo = minimally, the proper duration of the word "tropical". The subscription for the malady is a trip to the troppacanna, "troppa" + "canna" ("weed" in most Latin based languages)

-- Chris Leo


Troppopomo usually appears in question form. When Laura and I work on scripts I may say something like, "So we both agree this screenplay is about a screenplay, but what if we were to set it in the future and have it flash back to the past, which would be right now, the present? And in this screenplay that they're working on the protagonist is struggling as a playwrite, not officially making movies like us? And also not here in Bologna like we are, but somewhere similar...Ferrara? I dunno troppopomo?" To which Laura would respond, "Dai Grease ("Grease/Greece" is the way "Chris" comes out in Italian and I'm running with it), I don't wanna be poor forever!"

At least two levels of potentially troppopomo happen here at once. The first is that which Laura is responding to. The second is when, instead of responding to Laura's distress, I get caught up in wondering if there's a deeper gnosis to the way I hear her pronounciation of "poor" as "pour." Are we pouring it all out? Or did she slip into French with that pour? Was she therefore saying she didn't want to be "for" -- as in directional but not actually in a thing -- forever?
"Laura you're brilliant! Are you saying that the "from" is the "form", everything is pour!?"
"Dai Grease! Povero come la polvere, amore. Stop scaring me."

Named after the fruit related primarily to through its tappestral image amidst unicorns and lances rather than through the fruit itself, this script we hope to be our keystone is the pomogranite (pomo + pomegranate + granite), the earnings that take us out of the red are our pomodoro (pomo + gold), the beaches where we lay our heads forgetting about Le Pomme Grande (New York City) are adorned with palms (from the Proto-Indo-European pela "to spread out flat").

troppo ("too much" in Italian) + po(st) + mo(dern) = troppopomo.

If you think it feels like a dinosaur, you're right.
If you think the "pomo" part sounds a little fey, you're right.
If you have any success at all in getting your head around a word that appears as a fey dinosaur, well then I have a word for you...(oh forgive me god) the large and terrible onomasticon itself, the glossary from the age of the glaciers, the lexinivorous...THESAURUS!

-- Chris Leo


Tuttullage, tutto (“all” in Italian) + ullage (“amount remaining before a bottle is empty” in Anglo-French), is the watchful eye at the table who cloaks alcoholism under a guise of etiquette by making sure no one’s glass goes empty while no carafe stays full. “It was under the tuttullage of Signore Rosso that we were able to get Gene to divulge, but unfortunately, by the time she began Signore Rosso himself was too lit to officially witness it."

tutelage + destitute = reconstitute through fermented fruit

-- Chris Leo


A typesetter is one who believes setting things in print validates them. From the Latin “typus”, for “figure, image, symbol”, “type” can only therefore represent the something it’s discussing. A typesetter literally only believes when a type is set, a form given, a genre named. The most eloquent argument proposed passionately on a street corner is all well and good, but before it's put into print with more prints of cross-references from other prints, it is just another cockamamie theory. Typeflex takes the opposite approach. A typeflexer believes the idea at hand loses its meaning, even if in miniscule amounts, once it is set in type. The age of the internet is the age of the typeflexer, until this sentence is edited. However, like the River Plate manifesto itself proclaims, typesetting makes for excellent diaries and gives us forms from which to break from.

-- Chris Leo

U

An umloud is one way at holding conversational reins while waiting for inspiration to hit in between actually having anything to say. “I believe that what so forth and however well UMMMMM therefore we should well we should y’know UMMMMM and…” Like the two dotted German umlaut above a vowel – for it is certainly not a period, nor is it the ellipsis that allow us to fill in our own ending -- the umloud is slurred for an umpteenth amount of m’s until outside affirmation “you’re right, I’m with you” frees this führer of phrases with an ohm for at least a few spaces.

-- Chris Leo

V

vagitarian or cocknivore?

-- anonymous

W

Wowel. World War II aside, the wowel may be the only example of German over thinking and Italian sheer gut arriving at the same conclusion. When Germans see the letter W they hear a V, when they see a V they hear an F, and though in theory they know the same does not hold true for other Latin based languages, in practicality nerves often get in the way of choosing the correct sound. In this case, modern Romans created a sixth vowel to express something foul by exclaiming all of the vowels at once and in proper order: AAEEIIOOUU!!! Basic wit would therefore have a Brit calling this offense a fowel, but the German misappropriation of the many vestments of V has given us a sister of a synonym that captures a foreigner's astonishment dead on: the Wowel!

Wow + vowel = Porco Dio! You didn’t really just do that did you?

-- Chris Leo

X, Y, Z

Xenofib and xenophobia are often synonyms just as hate and envy often spring from the same well. The xenophobic wasp explores her creases of skin and lace with delicate embrace while xenofibbing about her loathing of that other race she dreams is filling the place her husband dreams was more nappy than straight. Conversely, the maid wishes she was the matron as the doorman takes riff-raff personally as yellow stars mutated to pink Palestinian license plates as the only advice I could’ve given Trotsky would’ve been “Run boy run! Keep running! The xenofibs are autophobes hunting xenophobes to avoid autoprobes! Run!”

-- Chris Leo


xxex is one last chance after the last sentence to slide some slightly soprasubliminal covetousness in, but let it breathe while things mend. Six months minimum after the last curt “Sincerely” vented (though more cold “Sincerely”s may counterintuitively be the apt approach to send – at all costs keeping cloaked any ideas of getting back in bed). Never, don’t bother, move on, if the letters always ended in “Love”, and regardless -- now is no time for hearts. The theory is that the evolution of post break-up post scripts should start with ‘xoxo’ and shorten to an ‘x’ getting rid of the hugs, keeping every phrase fast and every paragraph neat supplying not a crumb she can crumble up to aggravate this feat. In its rise you might remind her you’re a guy with an ‘xy’ before saying bye, then cross your fingers and let it linger with an ‘xxx’ for at least a week. After that, step back with ‘xx(ks)’ to have her thinking that you’re sweet. But let it breathe, let it breathe, always let these breathe. When the message has matured and the missives have massaged, drop the bomb and send us a thank you from the sheets.

xxex = the mistake is to view the final letters of the alphabet as the end when they are truthfully just the most recent additions, innovations in fact, lengthening the tail…

-- Chris Leo


Yarely is a pondersomely all-encompassing fixed morning glare beyond over yonder all the way ‘round the sphere until it returns back to the cap like a weary pelligrino for the first sip of cappuccino. While it’s still “early” the ancient root of the word ayer brings us from way back then, to last “year”, to “ieri” (“yesterday” in Italian), to “here”, to “there”, and yarely we think how we barely make it. "Yearn" has the word "year" in it and comes from the North Umbrian word "giorna" which is nearly identical to the Italian word for day "giorno" though North Umbria and Umbria proper are far far away from each other and where has all the time gone and how much is left? But don't worry about it, it's still yarely. A yearning yen for something is one long longing and the cosmos is a mess this morning. “Everything ok, honey?” “…What?…Oh sorry babe, got lost watching the pigeons from the kitchen window, but it’s still yarely, just give me a second.” And if this catches you while yarely, try wrapping your head around this: "ano" is Italian for "anus" and once meant just "a ring, "anno" is Italian for "year" and was once the diminutive of anus...

-- Chris Leo


Zed. Woe the American abroad who craved exoticism but, feeling too lazy to learn another language, chose Scotland where it was once believed we shared a common tongue. In fact, not only do we not speak the same breed of English, but when the sentences also come mixed with Doric, Gaelic, and Tennents, learning Russian may have been easier afterall. Consider then returning to the States spat in the face like a Vietnam vet held responsible themselves for the unpopular war when Britishisms like “bum a fag” and “cues are for neds” sneak in. Americans hate what they consider to be the forced extrinsic linguistics of these repats, though the truth is Americans have no idea just how many other “foreign English” words they suppress. It isn't easy. The worst is when other Americans who’ve spent time in Britain in the past as well, forgetting just how difficult the transition was for them too, call you a Zed.

Ned stands for “Non Educated Delinquent” in Britain + Zed is halfway between "Zeta" and "Z" = certain parts of Ireland call Neds "spides" because their fetal alcohol syndrome and methamphetamine raised body resembles the big belly and skinny limbs of a spider. When the American who chose Ireland like the American who chose Scotland encounters the other American who chose Ireland and one calls the other a "spied" = choose your side, chameleon

-- Chris Leo

Appendix (Old Words Revisited)

{Remember, though it's fun to think words carry latent traces of their initial meanings with them, the truth is they mean only what they mean NOW.}


Abroad, a widening.

-- Chris Leo


Albania is the other Land of the Rising Sun. Like Japan, it lies east of the country that named it. In this case, Italy. "Alba" is sunrise in Italian.

-- Chris Leo


Cream. "Letch" and "lecher" come from The Old French "lecheon", a debaucher. "Lecheon" came from Latin "lingere", to lick. "leche/lait/latte" come from the Latin "lactare", to suckle, and before that from the Greek "galaktos". So yes, not only does it look like the letch and the suckling baby are linguistically linked and that the Milky Way Galaxy is redundant, but it seems that from our most micro to our stellar macro and all the debased galas inbetween, the word is always milk. Take a look at the Milky Way when it appears in the night sky before it gets too late. "Milk" comes from the Proto Indo European melg, a stroke, I guess a very very large one. The suffix -"-latry" signifies worship, but if everything is latte already that would render worship rather narcissistic. How lecherous!

-- Chris Leo


Gown comes from "gyne" and sounds like "gone" because the idea of every good gown is to stimulate the desire in others to get it gone quickly, like how "dress" is the opposite of what men want to have it continue doing. And while we are here, let us pause for a moment on the utter awesomeness of the word "negligee".

-- Chris Leo


World comes from the Old English wer ("man", like "werewolf") + "old", Old Man Mother Earth.

-- Chris Leo


The accepted etymology of noose has it coming from "knot" from the Latin "nodis", but that "k" suddenly appearing and then disappearing again should raise a flag. The "k" only exists in Italian and Latin in foreign words. Coming before vowels the "k" sound is represented as "c" in Italian; coming before consonants the "k/g" sound is written as "g" (Greek "k/gnosis" becomes "gnoscere" in Latin and "knowledge" in English via Germany). "Pneus" in German is "tire", from the Greek "pneuss" for "air". Though "p" generally falls to an "f" via lenition, its odd placment here before the "n" would have made that impossible. In fact, the only time the "pn" combination happens in English is with words from this same root (pneumatic, pneumonia), but the "kn" combination is common and therefore human error might have one transcribing the awkward and unrecognized "pn" consonant blend into the awkward and recognized "kn" consonant blend. "Noose" from "knot" from "pneuss" has it draining and framing air in the former and latter respectively. "Noose" is wrapped around something "loose". Further removing this word from the Boot, modern Italian uses a word whose root has no relation to "noose", "cappio", as in "a header".

-- Chris Leo


Secretary, one who keeps secrets.

-- Chris Leo


Survive means literally to be "on life", different from the Italian "sopravivere", which is to be "above life".

-- Chris Leo


Vaudeville. Other than the Statue of Liberty and the true art of trains, this is the only example of something the French created for New York. The Vaux de Vire, "Valley of the Plateau," is a river that runs through Normandy and empties out into the English Channel. In the 15th century the people of the region entertained each other with tales and chants regarding the British invasion of Normandy. Another claim has the word's derivation from voix de ville, "voice of the city," the song and dance of triple agents during Le Reign of Terror. The fundament of vaudeville is that it travels, and rapid motion through space is no better evinced than by a river. But vaudeville finally found a home in the biggest shipping town there was, New York City. And wouldn't vaudeville have been comfortably familiar in theaters of the 20th century's first thirty years designed as those in Paris, the food and wine fat with Frenchsomeness, the stage acts frolicking with the acknowledgeable innuendo of French chicks? But finding a home actually did not mean vaudeville stopped moving. Jackson Heights, Queens, was established along the 7 subway line as an all white enclave within New York City at the turn of the Twentieth Century to zip fancy commuters into Times Square for their jobs and back out again in time for dinner with fellow snobs. The "problem" was that the developers failed to take several French innuendos into equation. First, the borough chosen was called "Queens" which when coupled with the gayness of vaudeville and the phallicness of trains meant that it was the white gay vaudevillian actors more than any other group that took to Jackson Heights. Soon the miffed rich moved on and within thirty years Jackson Heights, echoic of the Statue France gave us, had become the most ethnically diverse neighborhood in the world. The valley has moved to the heights.

-- Andy McCarthy, Chris Leo

Glossary

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