infra dig

\IN-fruh-DIG\

adjective

: being beneath one's dignity : undignified

INFRA DIG is the abbreviated version of INFRA DIGNITATEM, the longer Latin form. Like M.O. (modus operandi) this shortened form made its way into popular culture. Or so says Merriam-Webster. I've actually never heard this supposed slang before. Are all the cool kids walking around saying Target brand mouthwash is too INFRA DIG for their taste? (thanks, Liz, for this product image in my frontal lobe) Am I missing something?

This word kinda sounds like something from Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, but from the end of the movie when they were officially "learned." Intellectual slang, if you will. But the phrase also has a particularly early 90's air to its sound. INFRA DIG. I can't quite put my finger on it. I think its the shortening of dignitatem to "dig." It's so...surfer. And surfer is so early 90's. Speaking of, I just had the joy of re-watching Miracle Beach yesterday—a quintessential Cali-flick from 1992. Themes: love, greed, beach life, babes. Morals: a "money can't buy you love" story. Classic. Featuring Ami Dolenz of She's Out of Control fame.

I search for INFRA PIG and discover snouts are the hairiest and hence the coolest parts of a pig's body. And I mean "coolest" in terms of temperature, not excellence.

Excellent: also a fundamental term of the early 90's. Did Bill and Ted pioneer this adjective or just perpetuate its popularity?

I'm thinking I should consider writing my thesis on early 90's pop culture. How appropriately specific. And when I say "early 90's" I'm obviously referring to the pre-Kurt-suicide days of the decade when jeans were ripped, neon was not yet INFRA DIG, and Jim Carrey was that guy from In Living Color.

Those were the days. I'm old enough now to have permission to say that.

peloton

\pel-uh-TAHN\

noun

: the main body of riders in a bicycle race

Every year thousands of Portlanders gather on a Saturday night in early summer—probably at least a little drunk—for the nation's largest Naked Bike Ride. Dress code: as bare as you dare. The ride has been doubling in number since its inception in 2005. The most recent event this past June boasted 13,000 participants—that's 13,000 genitals rubbing against the sweaty vinyl surface of a bicycle seat, all together now.

On the night of last years naked bike ride I was at work. I didn't even know the ride was happening that night; someone may have casually mentioned it, and I may have casually misplaced that information in the mental bank of: try to remember this even though you will probably forget, in which many things lately end up.

After work Brody picked me up and we drove south to Banning's Pie House—the only 24-hour diner we had found in Portland that reminded us fondly of the east coast. At around 1 a.m. we drove back into downtown to pick up my bike, which was locked up outside work. I wrestled the bike into the trunk of his Grand Prix and got back into the car. As we were about to set off toward home we saw what appeared to be a sea of blinking bike lights heading in our direction. As they approached, it occurred to me—the information that had conveniently slipped into the second or third layer of the day as though it were a rent check forgotten under a pile of grocery receipts—the naked bike ride, riding directly toward our car.

And so we sat in the center of the PELOTON like spectators in a theater, as hundreds of naked bicyclists rode around our car. I thought of that part in Jurassic Park (hardly an unusual reference) when Alan and Lex and Timmy hid under a log as a herd of Gallimimus stampeded toward them. Bikers hit the hood of the Mercury with their palms, screaming "Get out of the car!" and "Get naked!" All we could do was laugh, in that way one laughs when something is funny but also uncomfortably awkward. It's safe to say neither of us had seen so much live cock in our collective lives. It took at least twenty or thirty minutes for the whole caravan to pass.

This is one of those memorable summer-nights that will be filed away with the others: stealing a 6-foot tall wooden sign shaped like a smiling cob of corn from a local farm, eating Doritos at the end of a dark cul-de-sac, singing and dancing to The Beatles' "The Word" pumping from someone's car stereo, arriving at a beach at dawn after walking ten or twelve miles to watch the sun rise. Always hot and unforgettable.

ponderous

\PAHN-duh-rus\

adjective

1 : of very great weight

2 : unwieldy or clumsy because of weight and size

3 : oppressively or unpleasantly dull : lifeless

When I think PONDEROUS, I think ponder : to consider, meditate, or weigh carefully in the mind. In Merriam-Webster's example sentence, they call a textbook PONDEROUS in contrast to its electronic counterpart. I am not thinking in objects. I am thinking in ideas, emotions, thoughts. The textbook is not as PONDEROUS as the dread of its size, the annoyance at its cumbersomeness, the impatience toward its short shelf life, the realization of its obsolescence, the oppression of its contents.

But—maybe I shouldn't get deep so early in the morning. There's a high of 92 degrees today. I should save my energy for sweating.

Things of a PONDEROUS nature:

- going as a date to someone else's work party

- the magazine selection in the waiting room at a dentist's office

- watching a tennis match on television

- the banter between two DJs on the top 40 station a.m. radio show

- the last two minutes by the time-clock before punching in to work

Reading over this list, I would consider all of the above items to be not only unwieldy or oppressively dull, but also depressing. I wonder if the decline into sadness is inherent to the PONDEROUS. Probably. I can't imagine why any weighty or cumbersome or brutally dull thoughts would inspire joy or serenity.

Boy, you're gonna carry that weight, carry that weight a long time.

cadence

\KAY-dunss\

noun

1: a rhythmic sequence or flow of sounds (as in language)

2 : a musical chord sequence moving to a harmonic close or point of rest

3: the modulated and rhythmic recurrence of a sound especially in nature

On 3

: Morning in Connecticut. My body sticks to the sheets of august: eleven or twelve years old, half awake, eyes crusted shut, the sound of a box fan on medium speed sucking the last remnants of cool night air into my stifling bedroom, and there is a bird repeating the same call like a broken record. The CADENCE of the sound imprints an image into my half-awake brain, the melody becomes an reflection of itself, a pattern. I watch the notes move on the backs of my eyelids as the bird sings the tune over and over. Sometimes it gets stuck in my head and returns later in the day—an arm's stretch away from the past. I play the tune on my teeth, the bony keys of a piano lining my mouth. I feel the shape of their pattern with the movements of my jaw—movements so minuscule I know the world will not notice; it will keep rotating, bustling, changing, as though I were doing nothing at all. I've never seen the bird. I've never even looked. I feel as though it doesn't exist, as though the sound comes from nature itself than from a living and breathing creature. It is the soundtrack to my wakefulness, miraculously there for me to notice and envelop and repeat. I think no one else notices the bird. Or hears. Or listens. I do not think I will be writing about the bird twenty years later

on the fourth of July

in a friend's bedroom while visiting home from the opposite coast. There is no way this thought could have occurred. I am so far from that moment, from that place, that past, that bird. And yet the past is always right in front of me (speaking words of wisdom?), perhaps just another arm's stretch, no further away than the morning from the afternoon or the bird from my bedroom window or home from anywhere else.

antaean

\an-TEE-un\

adjective

1 : mammoth

2 : having superhuman strength

This word came after Antaeus—son of Gaea and Poseidon who got his god-like strength from physical contact with his mother: the earth. Hercules eventually defeated Antaeus by simply holding him off the ground away from his power source.

I'm a bit surprised ANTAEAN defines something as simple as size + strength as opposed to a more specific concept. It's fair to say most mythological gods were sizable and strong. ANTAEAN might make more sense if it meant: obtaining strength from the earth or; having a great but fleeting strength or; the act of taking a power source for granted. I mean, I could define a tree as ANAEAN, but this idea doesn't embody the deeper significance of having a weak point.

I think the point of a concept like ANTAEAN is a reminder that everyone can and will be hit below the belt. But maybe this idea has already been assumed by Achilles. Perhaps ANTAEAN should rather define one who only wants to be remembered by his conquests rather than his defeat. This makes it even more curious that a word like mammoth appears in the definition, which undeniably carries with it the most divine defeat: extinction.

In New Haven's Peabody Museum of Natural History, there is both a skeleton

and a recreated model

of the Woolly Mammoth. The two stand next to each other behind a thick sheet of glass—stoic, huge, frozen, but also humble in their quest to be remembered. This is the essence of ANTAEAN; the earth found the weak point of a species, the huge creatures are long defeated, but they cannot cease to impress with even the shadow of their immensity.

nescience

\NESH-ee-unss\

noun

: lack of knowledge or awareness : ignorance

There's a kink in the system this morning; Merriam-Webster has fouled. In today's email the definition is listed twice—once as itself and once as the example sentence. The example sentence is pushed into the "Did You Know" etymology section, and the etymology is M.I.A.; my morning, and the mornings of fellow readers, is askew.

Now, I don't actually know if the Word-of-the-Day emails are posted via human hands, or if the information is entered by a person and handed off to the ghost in the machine, which processes and posts said message. If it was in fact the machine that flubbed, I want to attach meaning to its mistake, because, well, there's nothing like shoving meaning where it doesn't belong at 8:15 in the morning, or really any time of day.

Recently (as within the past couple years or so) I was checking my email and when I proceeded to sign out of my account the "sign out" link mysteriously read as mal: bad, evil, sick, in many languages. I paused and stared at the word for a moment, in a bit of disbelief and a whole lot of foreboding. I thought this was a sign of some sort, and at my age I've mostly given up reading anything as a sign because almost everything can be interpreted as such and this way of thinking clogs my brain from focusing on anything other than the meaning of my own life. But the mal incident begged to be read as a sign. And although I tried to stop myself, although I tried to contain that thought as though it were water shooting out of a busted pipe under the sink, the phrase plastered my frontal lobe like a casino billboard: What does this MEAN?

I thought for a moment about not signing out. If mal in fact was a bad omen, I would be a fool to click the link. But that paranoia lasted only a moment and I signed out as normal. And nothing bad happened. But I suppose that's only my perception. If I were a person more sensitive to signs and omens and such, I could perceive everything bad that has happened in my life since that moment as a direct result of my NESCIENCE to the significance of the mal.

What concerns me more is not why but how? How did mal just appear in my email? Was it just a glitch in the matrix? That's more curious than placing the responsibility in the hands of some bored hacker fucking with Hotmail accounts. I realize this exploration of how totally contradicts my above statement about attaching meaning to the obsolete. Well, I have no excuse for this change in discourse. Apparently my Saturn is in return, or I'm in my return of Saturn, or some sort of astrological phenomenon is happening (according to my friend Liz) that causes me to be particularly confused. This is a relief of sorts, being able to place the blame on the positioning of the stars. Lightens my existential load a bit.

So. Merriam-Webster fucked up. What does it mean? It means I don't know the etymology of NESCIENCE. It means I have to take an extra step to seek out this information (NESCIENCE = nescientia = not + science or knowledge). It means I sit at this computer wondering absently who/why/how this mistake occurred. It means I then begin to wonder why I waste my time wondering such things. It means I will blame this over-analyzation on Saturn and then wonder some more about why I'm passing the blame, why there needs to be any blame in the first place, why the fuck I care, and why I'm still writing this paragraph.

Wake up and smell the NESCIENCE, blooming like fragrant flowers in the summer of my years.

advert

\ad-VERT\

verb

1 : to turn the mind or attention

2 : to call attention in the course of speaking or writing : make reference

I sat at the table, eating an egg sandwich thinking, ADVERT(isement)...ADVERT(ising). I couldn't seem to focus on the verb. And then the D disappeared and I started thinking of aversion. I must be careful not to confuse ADVERT with AVERT: to turn away or aside. What a difference a D makes. That D ADVERTS ADVERT from its meaning.

These words both come from the Latin verb vertere: to turn, as do revert, invert, and divert. Vertigo is also derivative, describing a turning or whirling motion. Likewise, extrovert and introvert mean to turn outward or inward, respectively.

To everything, vert, vert, vert.

Vertical? More complicated. From vertex, or the highest point, also originating from vert, to turn, to whirl, to swirl, the head of a whirlpool, the top of a soft serve ice cream cone.

Last night, Dip Top ADVERTED my attention to its delectable ice cream cones, soft serve dipped in chocolate, a hard sweet shell, a flimsy white paper napkin, a photo of a funny sign, a drive to the beach, a boat gliding across the sound, a firework in the distance.

I am ADVERTED from everything tonight, on pause, trying to find where attention belongs in the first place.