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Success
Personal salvation as pursued by the go-getter; an elusive commodity that, when finally attained, usually finds the achiever too exhausted and atherosclerotic to enjoy it. |
Suicide, Assisted
The peculiar need, possibly only in an overpro-fessionalized society, to entrust a final act of private desperation to a qualified expert. |
Suicide, Teenage
A young bird that hurls itself from the nest because it looks at its stubby wings and despairs of ever being able to fly. |
Sunbelt (U.S.)
A land of perpetual summer that stretches from Disneyland to Disney World, its two main cultural centres. Now attracting hordes of new settlers as winter-weary Yankees forsake home and history for a chance to mow the lawn twelve months a year. |
Sunglasses
Shaded spectacles worn outdoors by the overheated and indoors by the oppressively cool. |
Sunspots
Small dark areas that may indicate turbulence on the sun or malignant melanoma in those who stay out in it too long. |
Supermarket
The grocery store that made grocers obsolete. A prodigious pantry stocked with enough varieties of breakfast cereal to cause acute nervous disorders in sensitive shoppers, esp. those lately arrived from Third World nations or Eastern Europe. |
Support Group
The company that misery loves; a club formed by those whose suffering takes a specialized form, like Repetitive Strain Injury or a crippling fear of badgers, and whose members derive deep comfort from knowing that somebody in the room is even worse off than they are. |
Surfing
An imported water sport that apparently turns the hair blond and reduces the vocabulary of its adherents to approximately twenty words, half of which are dude. |
Surgery
The attempted repair, removal, replacement or rearrangement of uncooperative innards, occasionally necessitating the disposal of the patient. |
Survivalist
A future-minded citizen who looks forward to the day, post-Armageddon, when he can take aim at the neighbours who pound desperately at his door. |
Sycophants
Shameless subordinates who earn their sustenance by courting and flattering the powerful, like those scrawny birds that live by plucking food particles from the teeth of crocodiles. A species frequently sighted in Hollywood studios, ad agencies and corporate boardrooms. |
