The Latest From Wittenburg

A lot of good stuff in the most recent update to The Door's website...

The Bush administration continues its war on terror.

Focus on the Family denounces God as pro-gay.

A priest whom God helped catch a huge fish now believes God wants him to sell it for a huge amount of money.

My last name is more common than you might think. Rest assured I am no relation to this guy, the only faith-healing dentist I have been made aware of.

For those who lack experience in distinguishing satire from reality (an acquired skill, to be sure), the first two are tongue-in-cheek. The last two, sadly, are of the strange-but-true ilk.

Now, as I cross 'ilk' off my list of words to be used on my blog, we move on to the previously promised topic of commonly known but heretofore unnamed concepts. An example is surely in order.

When I was young and computers were new, my brother Brad and his friend Ryan Dergousaff (I offer no apologies for misspelling a name like that after fifteen years) were playing around on one. A random gesture directed at the keyboard produced the combination of letters 'jkstpo', which immediately struck them as so indisputably significant that it must have meant something. After a brief discussion, they concluded that it referred to the annoying feeling of having to sneeze but being unable to. The term stuck with ferocious conviction, and to this day anyone who spent a substantial amount of time in our home during the 90's will know what this word means. Nowadays it is used more frequently as a verb, as in the sentence, "Dammit, I was jkstpoed." I believe my younger brother Derek still uses the email address jkstpo at hotmail.com.

But often these nebulous concepts aren't named so easily. The brilliant and truly brilliant author Douglas Adams coauthored an entire book devoted to this practice, and yet almost none of his offerings have stuck. The Meaning of Liff offers hundreds of definitions for the undefinable. The word liff itself refers to, of course, a common object or experience for which no word yet exists.

Sadly, I don't have the book. Unrelatedly, my birthday is this month. If I did have the book I could check whether there is a word for the simultaneous feeling of contrition and condemnation you feel when you go through a yellow light which is turning red and are thinking to yourself, "I probably should have stopped for that," when you look behind you and notice that the guy behind you ran it too, the maniac! Other common liffs include the act of having a friend smell your breath, and the moment of confusion caused by making a typo in Microsoft Outlook or Word and pausing, only to find that the program has already corrected it for you, causing you to stop typing for longer than it would have taken just to fix it yourself and go on.

I'm sure you can think of more.