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Baseball
A beloved American pastime graced for over a century by men of mythic stature; a game still played throughout the soft summer evenings on spacious green fields, where the eager spectator may watch young millionaires spit tobacco juice, throw tantrums and adjust their crotches in public. |
Basketball
Dribbling for dollars; a fast-moving gymnasium sport good-naturedly devised by white men as a showcase for the superior talents of their black brethren. |
Beautician
A professionally schooled hair sculptress whose own coiffure should be sufficient to scare off potential customers. |
Beauty
An aesthetic radiance that delights the soul; a quality much admired in women, landscapes and tropical fish, but curiously out of favour in art throughout the modern era. |
Bed and Breakfast
In Britain, a cheery and inexpensive lodging-place that astonishes travellers with monumental helpings of toast and marmalade, cereal and cream, sausage, bacon, eggs and grilled tomatoes; in the U.S., a pricey sleep-in antique gallery managed by polite neat-freaks, married or otherwise coupled, who shrewdly feed their guests oat-bran muffins in the hope that they might survive long enough to return next year. |
Beeper
A portable electronic alarm used to summon indispensable professionals during their off-hours; e.g., physicians on the golf course or teenage drug potentates in the classroom. |
Beer
An intoxicating golden brew that re-emerges virtually unchanged an hour later. |
Bestseller
What a book is called when as many people buy it in a year as fill a stadium for a single local rugby match. If a book's prose style is stronger than its publicity, a more fitting analogy might be a school fourth eleven game. |
Bible Belt (U.S.)
The empire of the saved: a broad swath of land that sweeps from the Confederacy to the high plains, embracing all manner of Baptists and Methodists, revivalists and Holy Rollers, who gather to praise the Lord and dream of a place by the Beautiful River, until a tornado flattens their tent and they dream no more. |
Bicycle
Formerly the chief mode of transportation for the prepu-bescent, exhilarating them with newfound joy and independence; a pleasure now appropriated by a clannish breed of quasi-profes-sionals, who read specialized magazines so that they might acquire the bicyclistically correct helmet, water bottle, stretch pants and thirty-seven-speed Italian racer. |
