|
Abnormal
Occupying a point outside the shifting boundaries of social convention, like a same-sex couple before the 1970s or a twenty-two-year-old virgin today. Others now living beyond the fringe include rhyming poets, English-speaking cab drivers in New York, solitary restaurant patrons, celibate celebrities, non-academics who read anything written before 1920, business people who read anything written before last Friday, Japanese under-achievers, students who can locate Japan on a map, and anyone who still says whom. |
Abstract Art
Incoherent dabs of paint in which serious critics detect shadings of metaphysical doubt or alienation, when in fact the artist was simply suffering from the effects of undigested shepherd's pie. |
Academia
A chronic disease characterized by a compulsion to write lengthy specialized treatises in unintelligible vocabularies, for the purpose of rising in the esteem of those similarly afflicted. |
Accordion
The hybrid offspring of an organ and a pair of bellows, sounding like a harmonica with a pituitary problem; the happy scourge of ethnic weddings. |
Accountant
A dutiful book-balancer whose role within a corporation is to protect if from creative ideas. |
Acid Rain
Industry's revenge on nature for resisting its advances; a vial of caustic liquid tossed in the face of a beautiful woman. |
Activist
One who latches on to a cause like a terrier to a postman's trousers; an energetic meddler whose efforts can be as tiresome as they are tireless. |
Actor
A professional exhibitionist who manufactures emotions in a manner convincing enough to earn a living, generally by reciting the daily specials to restaurant patrons. |
Acupuncture
Waiting for a cure on pins and needles. |
Adultery
An alarmingly popular sin that, despite its name, appeals primarily to those in search of a second adolescence, or a third or a fourth. |
