Craptacular Mentalists Unite

Before I start this blog I will warn those of a delicate disposition that the contents of this blog may offend, more than usual.  I am in listy mode, and have listed some, in fact all words which those of you who like to put their hands on their hips and go ‘Well Really!’ with pursed lips, are going to go ‘Well Really! at.  You have been warned. If you’re feeling sensitive, queasy and a bit funny about girls swearing, do not read on.

 

As explained previously, I am crap at technical stuff and can’t do links.  But I highly recommend looking at Anna Pickard’s Little Red Boat blog today.  She’s in my blog roll and also can be found by going onto Google and typing the words Little Red Boat.  It’s amazing, this technology stuff.  Anyway, Anna has asked her readers to write in with lists of the words that make them laugh.  It’s topping seventy replies so far and it’s great.  It just goes to prove to me yet again that words are a wonderful thing.  My own contributions were:

 

• Mingus
• Groat
• Wibble
• Bob (this must be said in a Rowan Atkinson type manner)
• Craptacular
• Gibbon
• Skink

 

There are also some excellent words donated by other people which were also incredibly amusing, and which I had forgotten how much made me laugh, including:

 

• Flange
• Wobble
• Mollusc
• Uvula
• Fuckwittage
• Gusset
• Mullet

 

There’s lots more on Anna’s site, so hop over and check it out.

 

I love those made up words where you cannibalise an existing words to describe something.  It’s why I like ‘craptacular’ and ‘fuckwittage’ so much.  I just look at them and wonder how we could have managed to communicate for thousands of years with each other before these lovely, lovely words were invented.  How can you live your life without ever having uttered the word ‘fuckalicious’? It would be a crime against humanity.  It’s interesting how lots of these words describe horrible or rude things.  It’s like there are so many horrible things in the world that there just aren’t enough common or garden words to describe them and so new ones must be minted all the time.  Words like these include:

 

• Pantacular (for something that’s very pants)
• Bobbins (for something that’s just so rubbish that not even a rude word will do because it’s a waste of a good rude word)
• Fucknuckle (As a random expletive whilst burning flesh onto the cooker for example, or to describe an idiot who would burn their flesh onto the cooker in the first place).
• Fucktard (a horrible and stupid person)
• Mentalist (someone who is that extra, special bit mental, usually not in a good way)
• Spasmodified (something that’s been fixed, wrongly, by a mentalist)
• Destructinated (something that’s been hit by a hammer by the person who asked the mentalist to fix the thing that they then spasmodified)
• Explodinated (see destructinated)

  

I also like all the horrible words and phrases you use to describe people who are stupid, particularly the ones you coin at school:

 

• Spanner
• Plank
• Specialler
• Do you have a hat with a propeller on it?
• Gibbon
• Do you go to school in a yellow bus?
• Joey (as in that poor bloke Joey Deacon who they used to wheel onto Blue Peter every five minutes to show us how to be compassionate, only to turn us into a playground full of gurning muppets shouting: ‘You’re just a Joey Deacon you are! Bless them.  They did try).

 

I also like doing that gurning ’special’ face when someone has done something stupid or just annoying.  My brother and I used to do this to each other in the car, usually after we had been banned from fighting with each other out loud.  We would sit as far apart from each other as we could get on the back seat and then ‘turn and gurn’.  First we used to do it because we hated each other, then we would warm up to the game element and do it because it was funny.  Eventually one of us would snort with laughter and my mum would bollock us.  Then we would be united against the evil parents and the game would start again.

 

I realise that it is a sad indictment of my life and general level of maturity that I still find these things funny and can be reduced to a hysterical wee monster with tears of laughter streaming down my eyes by these words and gestures.  Yes! Yes! I am also the kind of person that finds farting in public funny as well, not my own farting you understand, just the random fartage of other people in inappropriate settings.  I can never, ever, as much as I try, rise above such things.  I just laugh, and the more disapproving other people get, the more I laugh. 

 

It’s just like the time I went to a poetry reading by a Welsh poetess called Gillian Clarke with my friend Rachel.  It was an exclusive poetry soiree at uni to which we and about six other people had been invited by the Head of Department who was also there.  Gillian was very serious, very poetic and rather keen on being female.  We were all shut in a very small room together and it ws like being on the front row of the theatre where you can’t nod off and eat jelly babies because everyone will notice.  I think we were there to make up numbers and because we were running the Literature society at the time. 

 

Poor Gillian did her best, but her poetry wasn’t really for us.  She was very keen on writing poetry about dolphins as I recall.  She lived near the sea and had bonded with a dolphin or something and they had become pen pals.  The poem that got us into terrible trouble was the one where she described going swimming with the dolphin and how she had had a blinding moment of revelation in realising that she and the dolphin were one, and that they were linked by the fact that they both had a uterus (I was going to say shared a uterus, but that image is far too disturbing, worse than thinking about fucknuckles).  She was gesturing wildly while she read.  Her hair was flowing, her beads were beady and as she said the word ‘uterus’, she stretched it out really long and loud, almost like a cow lowing, and she opened her eyes really wide like a tiny midget had just crept up behind her and goosed her when she wasn’t expecting it.

 

I bit my cheeks and stared at the ceiling tiles.  I felt that if I could keep doing this I would be fine.  Unfortunately I let my eye wander down too far and caught sight of Rachel who was bright red with her fist in her mouth, wriggling like she needed a wee.  She looked at me.  I looked at her.  We both dissolved into tears of laughter, complete with shaking shoulders.  We got our coats.  I can never use the word uterus now without thinking of Gillian and her dolphin. Bless! Luckily, I don’t have to use the word uterus much in every day conversation, which is probably a blessing for us all.

 

When I was at university we used to have a head of department whose name was Gavin. Luckily for him and my lawyers, I can’t actually remember his other name.  Anyway, he was a mournful fellow who really hated being head of department, living in Wales, teaching students etc.  Eventually he gave up and moved to Australia.  In the meantime we coined the word ‘Gavtastic!’ to describe something that was so unutterably wonderful you couldn’t quite believe it.  It was kind of an ironic homage to a man who clearly couldn’t remember the last time something ‘Gavtastic’ had happened to him, and even if it did it would at this stage in his life have just made him cry.  Bless him!