A
ALCOHOLIC: 1) An early role, usually assumed for various social missteps or one’s first stirrings of misanthropy; 2) a source of premature wisdom.
AMBITION: Often “naked” or “noble.” Preferable in people of new acquaintance to features such as sincerity or kindness.
ANTI-DEPRESSANT: 1) Fluctuating pretext for continued social missteps that might otherwise prove embarrassing (see ALCOHOLIC); 2) holding pattern of distaste for one’s career, spouse, etc.
B
BAND: Weekend activity for married males, founded on common tastes and/or advanced degrees. (see TASTE)
BECKETT: Excellent name for a housepet.
BIAS: A sin of ignorance. Everyone else operates from it.
BOOKSHELF: Carefully or casually organized, yet always incompletely known.
BROMIDE: Sound advice one seeks to avoid.
C
CELEBRITY: Understood through intermedia to be one’s imaginary friend; one usually envisions coming upon this friend and sharing opinions on work, home, culture, minorities, etc.
CLICHÉ: That which forms the readily recognizable elements of art, visual or narrative. When in doubt of its existence, identify regardless.
CREDIT: Unreliable gauge of self-worth. One should claim to be victimized by predatory lending.
D
DANTE: Excellent name for a housepet.
DERRIDA: 1) Filter of phrases through which modern identity is discussed in the French pluperfect; 2) a rather short man from the provinces.
DIPLOMACY: A quaint form of sincerity on the geopolitical scale. (see AMBITION)
E
ECLECTIC: Fresh and new, predictably so.
EUROPE: 1) Western edge of Asian landmass, site of numerous lessons in self-actualization in the form of wise/shrewd/forgotten grand-relatives; 2) a kind of older sibling to the United States, bitter for having been passed over in world lottery of domination.
EXERCISE: More noteworthy, though less effective, taken up late in life.
F
FANFARE: With what most everything enters into discussion. Very much needed to get public’s attention.
FLAUBERT: Responsible for the tired genre of nouvelle realism as clutched, somewhat poignantly, by the preceding generation of MFA graduates. Claim to find cruel unless read in the original.
G
GARDEN STATE: 1) Repository of jokes concerning cultural and/or geographical misfortune; 2) “The Graduate” for a whole new generation—seriously, it was like, my life.
GOATEE: Sharp-looking in certain areas of … 1992.
H
HELL: Other people.
HEMINGWAY: A heady combination of the virile and sentimental.
HIP: Asshole envy.
HISTORY: A huge undiscovered country, deceiving and swamp-like, littered with poor signposts. Its primary lesson may be confidently reduced to this: Beware of short men from the provinces. (see BROMIDE)
I
ICONOCLAST: Look in the mirror, rebel.
IRONY: Always appreciated, never called for. Like the cigarette one swears off, yet pulls heavily on in a moment of timidity. Try to locate use in objects chosen at random, then discuss as if lingua franca.
K
KHAKI: Sharp-looking in certain areas of … Blockbuster Video.
KINDNESS: Evidence of a weak constitution, poor education, and provincial thinking. (See AMBITION)
KITSCH: A free pass given to bad taste.
L
LIFE: 1) A biological allotment of roughly no more than 700,000 hours; 2) raw material of one’s Master Plan, or time spent as figments of imaginative reverie; 3) an addictive sugar-wheat cereal.
LINGUA FRANCA: Latin for “groupthink.”
LITERATURE: One leaf on the branch of cultural studies.
M
MACHIAVELLI: Used in its adjective form to describe political operations your side wishes it had thought of.
MEDICINE: In crisis. Unregulated. Denied the impoverished. Cheaper in Canada. Necessary for birth control.
N
NATURE: A Romantic state known for purity of heart and clarity of sight. If not for the bugs, somewhat preferable to exurban sprawl.
NIGHTMARE: Try coupling with “Orwellian” or “public relations.”
NOSTALGIA: Too close to sentimentality to be trusted, except when dissecting and celebrating parts of the collective unconscious. (see TELEVISION)
NOVEL: 1) Like opera or penmanship, an art form of the sort one hears is always dying; 2) a vessel for reaching the lowest rungs of gossip, usually for no longer than one season.
P
PAINKILLERS: Branch of homeopathy.
PETIT-BOURGEOIS: Whoever does not understand one’s humbly proffered and clearly reasoned commentary.
POSTMODERN: Synonym for bloodless.
PUNK: 1) A form of custom tailoring to hide the cost and/or brand name of one’s comfortable accoutrements; 2) a stay against graceful aging.
S
SOCIAL GRACES: Controlled anger.
SONTAG: Best consulted the way one would a broken clock.
SPORT: Physical link between bourgeois and proletariat. Usually one’s interest in following matches is directly proportional to one’s inability to play them as a child. Try to form opinions of any kind on the subject. (see LINGUA FRANCA)
SWEATPANTS: What one wears anticipating, or often in place of, bodily improvement.
T
TASTE: What one yearns to accumulate in place of hard currency.
TELEVISION: 1) Important element of what is derisively called popular culture. One should never apologize for seeming to have watched every new network or basic-cable program and pronounced it either lacking or transfixing and therefore evocative of zeitgeist (see ZEITGEIST); 2) its positive appeal is one more reason why you’ll never find a better job. (see ANTI-DEPRESSANT)
TERRORIST: Anarchist of modern technology and medieval cosmology. Celebrated as folk hero in dictatorial states and by various icon graphics on MySpace and high school kids in Dayton looking for a band name.
W
WATER: Petroleum of the twenty-first century. Lower atmosphere of the twenty-second.
WEALTH: Always relative. Claim to be unmoved by it.
WIRELESS: 1) A misnomer; 2) a state of being trapped in wired connections, as seraphim and the like are bodies caught between terra firma and terra celestia; 3) a reason to patronize Starbucks.
Y
YOUTH: Shapeless existence, before one knew better.
Z
ZEITGEIST: Defined through purchase habits. Like Arafat, never stays a night in the same place.