Anyone who has lived in Washington for even a short period of time will tell you the best time to visit the monuments is at night. The centerpiece of after-dark monumenting is the Lincoln Memorial, not only because of its beauty but also because of the view of the Washington Monument and its reflection from the steps of the Lincoln. Don’t worry about closing time, the monuments are always open.
Some of my favorite English language slang comes from, of all places, England. I’m especially fond of those four letter words which constitute simple declaratory judgments about some of the Queen’s most unappealing subjects. Prat is one of those words.
The simple definition of prat is fool. We’ve already learned from this Wednesday’s Word series how many synonyms there are for fool: goober, dingleberry and nincompoop being just a few. But a prat has definitive characteristics that makes him a specific kind of fool. A prat is arrogant. A prat is smug. A prat’s head is swelled with conceit. A prat may be the dumbest guy in the room, but he thinks he’s the smartest guy in the room. I use guy since I’ve never heard a woman referred to as a prat. Maybe one of my small handful of English readers can weigh in on that.
There are some other definitions of prat. Wiktionary says it is slang for “a buttock, or the buttocks; a person’s bottom.” If that’s not clear, free dictionary.com elaborates “the fleshy part of the human body that you sit on.” In Scotland, apparently, a prat can be “a cunning or mischievous trick; a prank, a joke.” And the Wiktionary also claims it is a slang term for female genitals. Now I grew up in a lower middle class community where there were innumerable, mostly crude, words used in reference to various female body parts. But I never heard this one.
So let’s get back to the definition that reflects how most Brits use the term. As always, I turned to the crowd-sourced Urban Dictionary to look for some real context around this definition. Here’s what I found:
Basically someone who’s a major idiot, or is delusional and dumb. Acts against logic and thinks he’s self-righteous. AKA: Major dumbass.
A self-aggrandizing, pompous f**k. Someone who is full of themselves and, almost invariably, stupid as well. With a hint of ‘deluded.’
An overly pretentious person. Someone who is so obviously into themselves that others notice and they fail to realize it.
Offering the kind of insight you can usually only get from a spelling bee moderator, the Oxford Dictionary used prat is a couple sentences:
He looked a right prat in that pink suit.
You’ve made me spill my drink, you prat!
So having read all this and given some thought to the concept of merging stupidity with arrogance, I couldn’t stop myself from asking Siri this question: “Is Trump a prat?”
Perhaps worried that it could result in Matt Goetz descending on Cupertino, I didn’t get a straight answer. But she did offer up a suggestion for me to make up my own mind by delivering this link from Vanity Fair: Trump’s Limo Driver of 25 Years Confirms He is an Unrepentant Asshole.
In its typically humorless way Merriam-Webster defines nincompoop as “a stupid or silly person.” How many words are there for a stupid person? There’s nasty ones, like asshole, judgmental words like idiot and derogatory pronouncements like moron.
Nincompoop is a kinder, gentler way to say stupid. I learned the word from my grandmother. She often used it in reference to the guy who lived in the back room of her house who I called Uncle Rob, although I was never aware of any evidence relating us. Nincompoop has an ever so slight tinge of empathy, even affection, while still calling stupid stupid.
Some synonyms: boob, dolt, nitwit, lummox, ding-dong, schmuck.
Use of nincompoop predated my grandma. It goes back at least to the early 18th century. One story is that Samuel Johnson, who compiled the first English dictionary, traced it to the Latin phrase non compos mentis (“not of right mind”).
They aren’t buying that over at vocabulary.com: “Nincompoop is a silly-sounding word that’s also kind of old-fashioned, like ninny. No one has any solid idea where it came from, and anyone who claims otherwise is, well, a nincompoop.”
As always I checked the Urban Dictionary for some alternative definitions. Here are some highlights:
“A person who’s intelligence is at a lower caliber and proceeds to flaunt his idiocracy in an unappealing or inappropriate manor(sic).”
“A braindead self important little turd given an impressive sounding job title to keep him blissfully ignorant of the world shattering nefarious machinations of his keepers.”
“Slang term for anyone who is a devoted fan of Nine Inch Nails, or NIN, usually only used by other fans.”
Does anyone still use this word? I searched newspapers.com for use of nincompoop in 2021. I found one columnist, Kathleen Parker, who used it to try to explain Republicans fealty to Donald Trump: “either Trump has a stockpile of incriminating videos — his people have people you know — or today’s Republicans are the weakest, wimpiest crop of nincompoops in American history.” (Monroe, La., News Star, Feb. 1, 2021). Only other use of nincompoop was in a syndicated crossword puzzle.
I have many blogger friends who write poetry. As a service to them I went to rhymezone.com and found this list of words that you can rhyme with nincompoop: dupe, scoop, snoop, Guadeloupe, chicken soup, alleyoop, rock group and basketball hoop.
Mending Walls is a public art project in Richmond, Va, the goal of which is to promote healing by having artists from different backgrounds tell their stories through their murals. The project was conceived by Richmond muralist Hamilton Glass. The name comes from a Robert Frost poem about two farmers who come together to mend a fence.
Beyond the Mending Walls project, Richmond is a city of murals with more than 150 adorning its public spaces.
I started with a lot of questions about this word. Is it one word or two? Is it dingle or dingel? And what exactly does it mean? I thought it referred to animal droppings, specifically the kind that come out in small round pellets, deer shit for example.
One definition of dingleberry is, courtesy of Merriam-Webster, “a foolish, stupid or contemptible person.” Synonyms include chowderhead, dingbat, schlemiel and doofus. You get the idea.
And then there is an actual berry called a dingleberry. Scientifically speaking it is a vaccinium erythrocarpum. That is a small dark red berry similar to a cranberry that is found in the southeast United States.
But neither of those represent the most common definition and usage of the word dingleberry. There are many ways in which this definition has been expressed with varying degrees of specificity and explicitness. Some are awkward and some are disgusting. I dug deep into the Urban Dictiobary to find this most elegantly stated definition of dingleberry:
“A smallish, semi-dry, extraordinarily tenacious remnant of fecal matter which, when unwittingly rolled into a mixture with toilet paper lint by the action of wiping, becomes almost irremovably entangled among ones anal hair, a situationality exacerbated by the vigorous chafing and friction between the buttocks and most commonly remedied by the sad and almost entirely unavoidable remedy of plucking out at its root the individual hair to which each dingleberry is conjoined.”
I will pass on providing photos of this one. I have no interest in searching for them and hope to never be in a position to take a shot myself.
With that definition in mind, consider some of these uses of the word dingleberry.
In California in the John Muir Wilderness there is a Lake Dingleberry. Apparently the lake got its name from the sheep that surround it, sheep that have dingleberries hanging from their backsides.
If you live near Columbus, Ga., you could take advantage of the services provided by Dingleberry’s Pet Waste Removal.
Untappd, the app for beer aficionados, has a listing for a Dingleberry beer, a product of the microbrewer Hell ‘n Blazes. It is described as “A Sour German wheat beer aged on boysenberry and passion fruit to give a tart slightly sweet flavor with a dry finish.”
If you prefer something harder, the Cocktail Builder offers up a recipe for a Dingleberry: a combination of root beer schnapps, Jagermeister, Crown Royal and wine. (offtheleash.net disavows any responsibility for what might happen if you go into a bar and order a Dingleberry.)
And last but not least you can go onto Amazon and order up a Dingleberry candle. No idea if it is scented and, if so, with what.
Renewal 2121 at ARTECHOUSE Washington is about how nature survives in an over-developed and technology focused future. The photo above and the two videos below are from the main gallery which features a vision of Tokyo 100 years from now. The visual design is by Yuya Takeda, music is by Mario Hammer and the Lonely Robot. The exhibit is timed to coincide with cherry blossom season in Washington.
Nothing ambiguous about this word. Cheddar is cheese. The kind of cheese you put on a cheeseburger. An excellent choice for a grilled cheese. And what respectable macaroni and cheese doesn’t include cheddar.
The typically straight laced Merriam Webster definition of cheddar is: “a hard white, yellow, or orange smooth-textured cheese with a flavor that ranges from mild to strong as the cheese matures — called also cheddar cheese.” Really?
So why is the woman in the Capital One commercial talking about saving cheddar when she shops on line? Because cheddar is also slang for money, a slang that is commonly used in rap songs. Like this one:
Is there a connection between cheddar the food and cheddar the cash? You betcha. It goes back to a time when Americans found certain benefits like welfare or food stamps embedded with a hunk of cheese. While it may not be one of the options at the local deli to add to a sandwich order, there is something called government cheese. This is an orange processed substance similar to American cheese. It was acquired by the government as part of an effort to subsidize the dairy industry, something that originated in the 1940’s.
By 1981 the government had stockpiled enough of this stuff that they could have provided 2 pounds to every American. President Ronald Reagan announced that the government cheese stockpile should be distributed to the needy. California was the first state to raise its hand. It got a first shipment of 3 million pounds which it distributed to welfare, food stamp and social security recipients. You can well imagine some of those folks saying, “just give me the cheddar.”
There are some other uses of the word cheddar. In the world of sports there is more than one and neither involve strange odors in the locker room. If a baseball pitcher serves up some cheddar it means he threw a fastball, and a good one at that. In hockey if you shoot the puck into the cheddar it goes into the top of the net under the crossbar.
No doubt thinking of the money definition, there is an online business news service called Cheddar. I have focused on cheddar the noun. There is also cheddar the verb, cheddaring being a cheese-making process.
Perhaps it is best summed up In the words of Ice Cube:
“See we down for whatever
It’s all about the Cheddar”
This island in the middle of the James River in Richmond, Va., once housed the Old Dominion Iron and Nail Works, producing nails, wire and horseshoes beginning in the early 19th century. During the civil war the island was used as a prison for captured Union soldiers. In 1863, there were 10,000 soldiers being held here. In the early 20th century the Virginia Railway and Power company operated a hydroelectric plant on the site.
Be the mid-20th century, the island and the river itself were in a state that was all too familiar for rivers that ran through industrial areas. It was severely polluted with few healthy fish or other wildlife and access to the river was prohibited.
Today, Belle Isle is the most popular part of the James River Park system. It offers hiking and biking trails, sunbathing on the rocks, a skate park, a granite wall for rock climbing and a wheelchair-accessible fishing pond. But mostly the beautiful island has returned to its natural state. Mother Nature has erased the vestiges of jailer and industrialist alike.
Do you know what a goober is? I’ve only associated the word with some uncouth expulsion of a bodily substance. Is a goober what you pick out of your nose. Or, if you were to hold your finger over one nostril and shoot something out of the other one is that a goober? (Something I’ve never done by the way.) Or, maybe it is a goober that you spit over the railing while you’re sitting in a rocker on your front porch with an early morning can of beer. (Also something I’ve never done. My porch is screened in.)
You can imagine my surprise when I looked up the definition of goober and didn’t find anything about snot rockets. A quick Google search brought up two definitions.
So if you’re short and a fool it’s sort of a double goober. There’s also a regional thread as you are more likely to be a goober if you are from Georgia or Arkansas. I was looking for a word for Newt Gingrich. And what about when that goober from Arkansas dropped a goober on Monica Lewinsky’s blue dress.
But that’s not all. There is a disgusting concoction of peanut butter and fruit preserves that goes under the brand name of Goober and another Nestle product called Goobers which are chocolate covered peanuts.
As usual, I turned to the Urban Dictionary for more elaboration. There I found “basically a goober is just a kindhearted, rather oblivious goofball. It’s a term of endearment really. It comes from the ancient Scottish verb ‘to goob’, which has to do with doing a dance and smiling sheepishly while doing so, exposing the goubs in one’s teeth. Basically a goober is just a kindhearted, rather oblivious goofball.”
Unpacking all that leaves you with a vision of a doofus doing some sort of jig with a big smile on his face so you can see the stuff stuck between his teeth. That brings us back full circle to the uncouth bodily substance issue.
