On Being Old

I feel like a real blogger now. 12 comments on my last post, 14 on the one a week prior. Granted, nearly half of them are me responding to my commenters, but that's the part I love. Doug takes an Oniony approach to his comments section, but like Frost, I have taken the less pastoral road and it has made all the difference.

It's fun to have strangers adding to my thoughts. It's even fun to have them thinking I was serious when I was joking. Handy tip for future reference: if you can't tell whether I'm joking or not, I'm joking. My sense of humor can sometimes make peanut butter cookies look like August in Mali.

Uh...that means it's dry.

Anyway. My sense of humor was on tragic display at Matt's birthday party on Friday night. I performed a graceless belly flop of a standup comedy routine for the gathered multitude, which (the routine, not the multitude) was greeted by infrequent flurries of half-hearted chuckles separated by extended periods of nearly audible blinking, and during which my wife apparently just wanted to run up, grab me by the shoulders and yell, "Stand the *#@% still!" She probably would have too, but those octothorpes are notoriously difficult to pronounce.

Eric did a pretty good job though.

Anyway. It was a lot of fun, regardless. I have no regrets, except maybe for sucking away a small amount of Matt's birthday joy, but he seemed to have as much of that as he did applesauce, so no worries.

But the heading of this post refers not to the increasingly ancient Mr. Henry, but to me. I turned 28 on Sunday. 28 was a tough birthday for my wife, unless you don't know how old my wife is, in which case it will be a tough birthday for my wife. There's this mathematical stigma about being closer to 30 than 25, some sort of slipping away of youth that seems to resonate more tangibly than a milestone birthday like 25 or 36. But to be honest, I haven't given it much thought. Birthdays have never been much of a big deal for me. It's not that I don't notice them or try to ignore them, more just that I don't know what to do about them, perhaps not unlike that check engine light Eric was talking about. But hey, how many people have the same birthday as David Hasselhoff?

Millions, obviously. I'm tempted to launch into a mathematical demonstration of the curious fact that in a group of merely 30 or so it's surprisingly likely that two of them share the same birthday, but I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader. Or the comments section.

Anyway. In keeping with the recent linguistic theme of this blog, I'd like to broach another word-ly topic for your consideration and discussion: Words That Should Be Brought Back.

I hereby propose the launching of an intentional, dynamic effort to reintroduce the following words into common, everyday speech. As I am just learning, the readership of this blog spans the miles majestically. Determined to use my powers for good and/or awesome, I challenge us all to impact the linguistic landscape with these pithy pieces of parlance:

thrice and threefold - Not only is it easier to say "thrice" than "three times," it sounds so much zippier. Try it next time you're describing a baseball game or Peter's denial of Christ.

divine as a verb - This is a cool way to say "figure out." Some say it should only apply to spiritual mediums, but why discriminate? Whether you googled it or just happened to guess right, say you divined it. It might get you a raise.

parlance - See above.

ilk - I used this one a few posts ago. It's a nice, compact, non-count word for when you're tired of type, sort and kind, and your listener will likely be subjected to a brief mental image of a horned, hoofed mammal. Who doesn't enjoy that?

octothorpe - Almost completely extinct, since the # thingy now goes by a plethora (not on the list, since so many people like to use it because so few people use it) of names including pound sign, number sign, hash, sharp, tic-tac-toe board, and # thingy. None of these make all that much sense to me, so why not bring back the original?
# Classic, now available at a keyboard near you.

idiosyncrasy - Winner of the award for Best Word Which Sounds Like An Insult But Isn't.

These aren't words, but they should be:

Yesterweek, Yestermonth, Yesteryear - Come on, it just makes sense. These can really save you a lot of explaining sometimes.

And finally, a word that we must all work together to stomp out entirely:

irregardless - Its definition on dictionary.com, in its entirety: Regardless. Enough said.

You have your marching orders. Now get out there and make a dialectic difference!