guttersnipe

\GUTT-er-snype\

noun

1: a homeless vagabond and especially an outcast boy or girl in the streets of a city

2: a person of the lowest moral or economic station

Like myself, my friend Bobbie Sue likes to save people. We are self-proclaimed martyrs, usually to boys, or perhaps men, although, she and I are a bit different in our choosing of those who deserve saving. I prefer to seek out those who have not lived up to their full potential, not yet realized how talented or amazing they are, and I want to push them in that final step toward self-worth. Bobbie Sue tends to lean toward people who are more fucked up, down on their luck, gotten wrapped up with the wrong crowd or substances. These choices speak a lot about who she and I are ourselves—I have spent a great deal of time trying to realize my own potential, and Bobbie Sue has admittedly pulled herself out from under countless bad influences.

Now let me help you, we think, without a drop of idealism.

One day a few years ago, Bobbie Sue met a young boy in the street. He couldn't have been more than nineteen. She recognized him from Whole Foods (where we both work)—he had been coming in, wandering around like a lost puppy, tall, shaggy hair, tight jeans, ripped sneakers, picking at sample baskets, generally forlorn. He was clearly a street kid, a GUTTERSNIPE, perhaps not quite homeless, but couch-surfing or about to overstay his welcome somewhere. While this lack of self-responsibility repulsed me, Bobbie Sue saw a project, a young hopeless and clueless boy who needed her help.

When she met him in the street he had picked up one of those jobs canvassing for Mercy Corps or Greenpeace or something of equal horror. She stopped to talk to him, to offer some sympathy for his state of affairs. Only the desperate or ignorantly idealistic will take one of these jobs. Clearly he was the former. He immediately took shelter in her sympathy, offering whatever sob story he had about moving to Portland, things falling through, friends bailing out.

Oh, honey, she said, scooping him under her proverbial mother wing. She offered her adult wisdom and her number, genuinely wanting to pull him from the hole he had so woefully dug for himself. She then left his side and headed up the street to work where she relayed this story to me. She was frustrated that she had to leave his side to go to work, wanting to steal him away from his awful fate of environmental solicitation.

I, of course, had no sympathy for this fellow. My victim of choice is the socially awkward pet who works hard to no avail, not the young beauty to whom the hardness of the city has dealt a difficult hand. But I understood her impulse to help, to save, to revive from the thralls of worthlessness.

The young boy never called, and we never saw him again, in Whole Foods or on the street. Perhaps whatever abbreviated wisdom she offered him on that street corner inspired him to make a change for the better, or at least return home to the warm flannel sheets of a twin bed in his parents' house. On the other hand, some other martyr may have come along who didn't have to go to work, and taken him in and offered him a cold beer and a warm bed or at least another couch to surf for a little while longer while he put off making any real decisions.

Part of me wants to empathize with street kids, with that fuck the system ideal, but I spent my late teens and early twenties working shitty retail jobs that I hated so I could have a better life. And I do. So, I have to admit, I'm mostly thinking, fuck off lazy spoiled brats.

edify

\ED-uh-fye\

verb

: to instruct and improve especially in moral and religious knowledge : uplift; also : enlighten, inform

Latin, Latin, and more Latin. This word stems from aedificare, the verb meaning "to erect a house." Somehow it made the transition into the figurative "uplifting via religion," and now the word generally means "improve" or the very secular "enlighten through knowledge."

But I'm interested in the original transition—house as metaphor for the self. I am definitely guilty of using the term "shaky foundation" to better illustrate the rocky beginnings of a doomed relationship. I have also heard people describe the act of "building walls" to figuratively protect their emotions. I suppose one could view a the development and aging of a home as parallel to the construction of self—layers of paint covering and recovering the original walls, the faded steps of a staircase climbed too many times, tack holes, irremovable stains on a worn carpet.

Yeah. I'm not really sure where this is going. I'm distracted. Just received an unexpected phone call. Spent a few moments staring at a chip in the wooden facade of my desk. The afternoon takes a turn.

The idiom—you can never go home again. You can never return to your childhood, you can never return to that first unobstructed sense of your self. I think that's what I was thinking about—the self as a house.

EDIFYING a house, EDIFYING the self. And then just leaving in order to EDIFY somewhere else.

Eh.

vexillology

\vek-suh-LAH-luh-jee\

noun

: the study of flags

Simple. Concise. The study of flags. Not much breathing room on this one. I wonder—how does one become a VEXILLOLOGIST? Well, according to the North American Vexillological Association (NAVA), anyone can become a member as long as the individual is "interested in VEXILLOLOGY and agrees to subscribe to NAVA's bylaws."

In case YOU are interested, here is NAVA's mission statement:

NAVA pursues vexillology as the scientific study of flags by:

• bringing into closer cooperation people interested in all aspects of flags such as their history, significance, specifications, use, and manufacture;

• furthering a strong and growing interest in flags as a serious study or as an avocation;

• promoting research into the origins, history, and symbolism of flags;

• publishing on flags and vexillology;

• formulating standards for flag teminology, methodology, and data recording;

• studying and providing guidance on flag usage and design through national surveys and guidebooks;

• cooperating with other vexillological associations, agencies, and research centers, and foundations; and

• representing vexillologists of North America on an international level.

  In lieu of the fifth point—formulating standards for flag terminology—their website boasts an "Illustrated Dictionary of VEXILLOLOGY," which is actually not very illustrated. Mostly text, but thorough. I should also mention the dictionary is an "on-going project," so perhaps their web-masters have yet to reach the whole "illustrated" part. They're getting there.

  Some terms of note featured in the not-so-illustrated dictionary:

  aspect distortion : the effect of distance on the perception of aspect ratio; for example, a flag with an aspect ratio of 1:1 1/4 may appear square at a distance.

  canton : An area of the field of the flag, set apart by color or design, and located in the upper portion of the field along the attachment edge. As viewed from the "front," this would be the upper left. On the United States national flag it is sometimes called a Union.

  guidon : 1) A swallowtail (q.v.), pennant, or other small flag usually carried at the front of an advancing military force and used for alignment, particularly a cavalry formation; 2) In the military, a soldier carrying such a flag.

  Jolly Roger : The traditional "Jolly Roger" is associated with the pirates of the Atlantic seaboard and Caribbean in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. There were actually many different pirate flags at the time, only a few of which resemble the common "Skull and Crossbones" that we know today. It is believed the name "Jolly Roger" is derived from the French "Joli Rouge" which means the Red cloth. Early records indicate that the red flag was often flown by pirates as meaning "No Quarter Given."

  pressure wave : The movement of a differential in pressure across the surface of a flag. It is the pressure wave that is responsible for a flag "waving in the breeze."

  I enjoy this last entry, although I usually prefer to call it "wind."

flagitious

\fluh-JISH-us\

adjective

: marked by scandalous crime or vice : villainous

This word derives from the Latin flagitium, meaning "shameful thing." While the above definition doesn't explicitly suggest this, M-W's example sentence references some FLAGITIOUS books, aka, erotica, which leads me to believe the "scandalous" nature of this word applies to content.

When I conduct a Google search for "FLAGITIOUS" books, I arrive at an article on booksandculture.com [a christian review] called "FLAGITIOUS Corruptions." I want this article to be about porn, but it's not. It's about imagery and idolatry in the Catholic Church. And the website won't even allow me to read the whole article without signing up, which I am less than willing to do. The article's title refers to a phrase pulled from John Calvin's 1543 manifesto, The Necessity of Reforming the Church. This afternoon, the first thing I think about when I think of "churches" and "imagery" is Madonna's Like a Prayer music video, greatly criticized for its use of religious symbolism.

I suppose Madonna was considered somewhat FLAGITIOUS in general—her subject matter, her videos, her torpedo-like bustiers. She has done an amazing job at marketing the scandalous, pushing boundaries just enough to remain fairly classy, unlike Mariah Carey (that was a trainwreck).

The Like a Prayer album was the first tape I ever bought with my own money. I listened to this tape, for lack of a better term, religiously. I remember losing the cardboard insert and creating a makeshift replacement out of notebook paper; I wrote "Madonna" and "Like a Prayer" on the lined paper, along with a drawing of a pair of lips. I don't know why I drew lips—the original album art is of course a photo of a woman's (presumably Madonna's) torso, her hands resting precariously on the waistband of her light-wash denim (so late 80s) jeans. Am I about to unbutton these? she asks the viewer. Perhaps at age nine I somehow understood the sexiness in this image and attempted to translate that essence into a crappy rendering of lips colored in with a Crayola magic marker.

But—hmm. Something about this definition bothers me, and I think it's that I don't associate scandalous with villainous. To me, scandalous implies simply rocking the boat, drawing attention by way of the waves. Villainous is like, well, the work of a villain. A bad guy. Madonna is not the bad guy. She's just a recovering Catholic like everybody else.

polyonymous

\pah-lee-AH-nuh-mus\

adjective

: having or known by various names

I was recently having a discussion with someone about the POLYONYMOUS nature of human genitals. We specifically expressed disappointment in the lack of synonyms for vagina that don't sound either degrading, offensive, dirty, pornographic, tactless or gratuitously cheesy. Of course this could stem from the inherent cultural stigma around female genitals as being rather taboo, causing listeners to cringe at the sound of any pseudonym. But it generally bums me out that "dick" sounds totally fine, while its female equivalent "pussy" makes me want to hose myself down in holy water.

Aside from the general terms—pussy, cunt, twat, snatch—there seem to be different categories for vagina synonyms, some of which I will attempt to classify here (and I'm going to limit it to the most representative examples, because the list really just goes on forever):

1) Vagina as Receptacle:

cum dumpster

2) Vagina as Home to Penis:

cock pocket

3) Vagina as Member of the Animal Kingdom:

beaver

4) Vagina as a Food Metaphor:

meat curtains

5) Vagina as a Gash:

hatchet wound

6) Vagina as Exalted:

glory hole

7) Vagina as a Shape it is Not:

box

8) Vagina as Some Made up Word:

poontang

9) Vagina as Epic:

the great divide

10) Vagina as What My Father Called It:

cherry

I don't believe I've used any on this list, rather, not ironically. I tend to say either "vag" or "stuff" or "jazz" or "junk." Sometimes even "shit." My first boyfriend Josh and I used to refer to it as "the girl area."

Dr. Eduard Friedrich, gynecologist who discovered Vulvar Vestibulitis Syndrome, refers to it as "the collision zone" (after which I aptly titled my essay on the subject).

But, as of last night, my new favorite is "babe cave."

argy-bargy

\ahr-jee-BAHR-jee\

noun

chiefly British : a lively discussion : argument, dispute

I'm not sure what to do here. I consider talking about self-contained instances of assonance, but the only other example I can think of is hocus-pocus. I consider talking about Brits, but I realize I know nothing on this topic. I consider offering an example of a recent dispute in which I have taken part, but the only thing I can recall is a minor rift during which my roommate made me feel kind of stupid for not knowing when bacon is done cooking—

Are you serious? she said.

Well, when the hell am I ever around the cooking of bacon?

Of course, she has a good point—I have seen cooked bacon, and I could possibly reach back to a point in my distant childhood when my mom occasionally fried bacon for my brother Zander, but really, this conversation took place at work and this bacon was for customers and I didn't want to be responsible for the undercooking of bacon and whatever repercussions might follow. But I would hardly call this an ARGY-BARGY.

I lie on my bedroom floor thinking, ARGY-BARGY? What am I going to do with this? I instead compile a FREE box while listening to Joanna Newsom, forcing myself to purge now that the term is over. The box's contents include:

- one old shoelace-less pair of puma sneakers

- an old white button-down shirt I bought when I was volunteering at the Portland Art Museum

- a round cartridge for a slide projector I bought thinking I would do some art project with it

- a handful of empty c.d. cases

- a pad of novelty faux-vintage post-its that have no sticking power

- a pair of stripy knee socks

Junk.

ARGY-BARGY. All I can think is, Georgy Porgy, reminded of a guy named George Mirena who was in my kindergarten class. I realize now, for the first time, that his last name is the same name given to my intrauterine device. This means nothing.

I locate a band called ARGY-BARGY on MySpace music. Self-described as "streetpunk." They're playing a show in the UK on August 7th, in case you're interested.

I'm done. It's been a long year.

ambuscade

\AM-buh-skayd\

noun

: a trap in which concealed persons lie in wait to attack by surprise; also : the persons so concealed or their position

This word is Middle French via Old Italian via the Latin (surprise!) word "bosco" meaning "forest." In the forest, hiding, preparing for attack. Now mostly used in the form of "ambush." But I so enjoy the sound of AMBUSCADE as I say it to myself—

ambuscade—

it's quiet, I want to whisper it in an ear. I suppose if I'm hiding, a whisper would be more appropriate.

I have ducked in my share of AMBUSCADES, I suppose. I have hidden talent behind modesty, audacity behind bashfulness, sex behind prudishness, love behind friendship. One time I hid under a garage awning holding a large branch with a old doll tied to the end of it up to a bedroom window. I may never be forgiven for this last one.

Sometimes, I surprise myself. I act out of character, coming out from behind the AMBUSCADE of my own personality: I am honest—really honest—in a place other than in a piece of writing; I cry in a movie; I admit I really love people; or I forget what I was dwelling on, even for only a moment, and it is the greatest revelation I can muster.