The Baboon Congress

G.O.A.T. Notes

75 Comments

Today’s guest post comes from Barbara in Robbinsdale.

It’s a very creative group of Babooners here on the Trail, and we sometimes use words not found in your standard English dictionary. So Jacque and I (back in April) put together a little Baboon dictionary, ultimately dubbed the G.O.A.T. (Glossary of Accepted Terms). I’ve been keeping track of some real gems that have appeared since then, and here’s what y’all have been adding to the mix. If you’re a newcomer, it may help explain some (but certainly not all) things. And if you’re an old hand, it will serve as a reminder of how we talk ’round these parts.

Baader Meinhof – defined by the Pioneer Press’ Bulletin Board as “encountering a piece of previously unknown information twice within a 24 hour period.” (It’s surprising how often this comes up.) See Joy of Juxtaposition for clarity through contrast.

Blevensing – going on and on about something, as the Austin Lounge Lizards (et al.) do in the chorus of the song, Old Blevins: “Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah…” and as follows: “Niblet is sometimes described as “long-suffering”… Imagine having to spend your days listening to [Mr.] T, blevinsing away…” (See Out to Pasture in upper right corner for more on Niblet and Mr. T.)

Cannardly – a more elegant way to express mixed ethnic heritage, as in: “He said he was Cannardly – so many different ethnicities that you can hardly tell…”

Ectopic – out of place, as in: “Ectopic comments are always welcome!” which followed: “Ugh, I … meant that reply to go under Beth-Ann’s comment.”

Fusspot – a very fussy person, as in: “Fusspot is a term created by my husband, who is much more of a fusspot than I am.” See also Troublespot, and Lucy in Peanuts for the variation, fussbudget.

Hooby – either a cross between a hobby and a hubby, or a hobby that’s a hoot… as in “become involved in a hooby or something that is real…”

Incumbent bike – a bike that’s going to stick around for another 2, 4, or 6 years.

Ingrown narcissism – self-regard that has become problematically internalized, as in …“if we stop for ice cream we may not have enough money to pay for Timmy’s operation to fix his ingrown narcissism”.

Jamicized: to be clothed in your jammies, as in: “There is an ice cream truck that frequents our neighborhood. We do not patronize that [ice cream] truck (partly because sometimes he comes around after we have called it a night and are jamicized, thank you very much).”

Joy of Juxtaposition – a confluence of references to something that was already in your knowledge base; see Baader Meinhof for clarity through contrast.

Latent utility – usefulness in the future, and a reason to keep an item, as in “There are the remaining painting and carving supplies, which I may one day use, and I consider latent utility useful.”

Pawlenty (verb transitive) – to hide something from the public, and then do what you want, as in: “the masses don’t realize until after they’ve already been pawlentyed.

Punctuational – on time for the blog, and keeping track of it throughout the day, as in: “Didn’t we tell you how important it is to be punctuational?”

Rojak (roh-jark) – a Malaysian colloquialism meaning a mix or a salad, also used to describe language, e.g. using several languages/dialects in a single sentence. See also Cannardly.

Schaumkessel – a German word for boiling or foaming kettle, or a relative who acts like one; as in this interchange: “My maternal grandmother was a Schaumkessel…” “Do you know what Schaumkessel means? It has such a cool sound.” “I think it means boiling or foaming kettle… and she kinda was….”

Snort – short for “That made me laugh so hard I’m snorting coffee (or some other beverage)”. Also a baboonish substitute for LOL or ROTFLOLAWM (see New Acronyms). Snort could be an acceptable short form of the TBB’s mission statement.

Spedition – a shopping expedition that include ice cream, as follows:
”When my son was younger and had to accompany me on errands I started to call them expeditions thinking it would make it easier to jolly him into going. The name was shortened to speditions. At one point I upped the ante and offered ice cream to make the journey sweeter. Then with an elephantine memory my son proclaimed the definition of a spedition included ice cream every time. ”

Spiritual tithe – a fine paid to a good cause, as in: I even ENJOY paying my library fines because I feel as if it is my spiritual tithe to an (almost) holy space.

Storage brains – the (often older) family members who recollect the family’s historical information, “Unfortunately all storage brains… have died so we have not much more than she could find in public records.”

Troublespot – those relatives and acquaintances who have been difficult or naughty. “It would be really unfortunate to be a fusspot and a troublespot all in the same day.” (See also Fusspot)

Wikiwalk – a “pernicious online phenomenon”; specifically, an unintended, possibly long and convoluted journey through the internet, as in: “today you are a lost soul on an endless internet search on into the time tunnell where minute turn into hours and the days go by without any indication that you were ever there. a little you tube video, a piece of information from the wikipedia archive on the topic.. off into the vast amounts of miniscule detail folks have assembled on whatever the topic.”

New Acronyms:

OFTLOW – oh for the love of wool

ROTFLOLAWM – rolling on the floor laughing out loud and wetting myself

TTFN – ta-ta for now (from Winnie-the-Pooh)

WOT – way off topic

What language would you like to be able to speak, and why?

75 thoughts on “G.O.A.T. Notes”

  1. BiB… THANK YOU. This is wonderful. In addition to being very funny, it is a great memory jogger for some fun trails we’ve wandered down in the past!

    Just the other night, while watching TV and seeing the Rosetta Stone commercial again, said to the teenager that I’d love to learn to speak Italian. The language of Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo, Lucretia Borgia – plus it has such a nice sound to my ears.

    I’ve wanted to do this for quite some time, but for the last couple of years have been quiet about it, since I didn’t want anyone to think I just got the idea from Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love). But what the heck, life is too short to worry about that.

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      1. I’m in a rush this morning.

        But obviously we need a word/acronym for attributing the wrong comment/blog to the wrong baboon!

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  2. Good morning to all,

    I have returned. I had a good time in the Big Easy on my vacation.

    I have my problems learning any language, including English. My problem is spelling and pronouncing words correctly. I don’t seem to have a good ear for getting down the sound of words. That makes it hard for me to learn new languages. I did complete a course in French, but didn’t learn much.

    There are many languages I would like to learn. Spanish is at the top of the list. It is not a hard one to learn and I run into Spanish speaking people fairly often. I have learned a few words of Spanish. In my opinion, a well educated person should know at least two languages. I think Spanish would be a good second language to have because there are a lot of Spanish speaking people in our country and it would useful when traveling in many parts of the world.

    Thanks, Barbara, for that list of Babooner lingo.

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      1. Yes, I think I did hear some French, BiR. There were tourists from many countries and I think I heard one couple speaking French. Also, some Cajun music makers were singing in Creole which I think is derived from French. Then, of course, there is another “language” where the main phase is “who dat” which I guess is not French.

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  3. Rise and Shine Baboons!

    Oh, snort!

    BiR this is so much fun. I missed a lot of the summer blogs due to over-involvement at work. I/We have been very busy decorating the new work space and making it functional. This Thursday we have our Open House from 4-7pm. Baboons welcome–there will food and wine–and we want to show off our new space. The address is available on the website if you follow my link. As friends of the shrinks no one will therapize you. I promise. But this project took over my blog-reading and writing time. I hope when this is over I get to write a couple of more blogs.

    Meanwhile, BiR, this is a delight. Thanks. This blog saved my sanity for the past 16 months.

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  4. i am very comfortable being the ugly american. i have traveled the world being able to earn only the words neccessay for survival, beer and bathroom in 15 languages. other than that i am relying on the fact that everyone who wants to get ahead on this planet speaks english. it is my reply to people who apoligize for their poor english that always get the same response. your english is much better than my …fill in the blank. chinese thai turkish irish german indonesian etc oh they laugh at the notion that an american would be able to speak their language.
    i do love the poetry of italian, my daughter is getting an italian major along with the communication major because she enjoyed her trip to florence so much for syudy abroad. she met her fiance from cosovo there and their shared language is italian cosovos main language is albanian, she is working hard to get the visa requirements accepted (it was a book about 2 inches thick of documents and details) and when he gets here his 7 languages will come ito play. anyone got a job opportunity for a 27 year old dynamo who speaks seven languages and will do anything from physical labor, running a crew to computer geek stuff and or architecture.
    i think the best sharing of a culture is by listening to their music. my cosovo future son in law and i hit it off big time when i loved his countries native music. balalikas and dancing are predominant, same with irish music, same with mexican same with german. it tells you all you need to know about the culture. this is especially true of baboons. if you get to the music thats all you really need to know about the group.

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      2. how about the folk art or art in general.dress and traditions like storytelling etc.. the soul of a people speaks out in whatever way it can in america we have been goaded into believing that the almighty dollar speakes louder than everything else and the subleties of our culture become secondary. in other areas where the hardscrabble life (thanks clyde) is tstill the norm the relief and identy found in the arts and traditions speak much louder than they do here in the good old u s of a

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    2. I guess that we still are well thought of as a people in most of the world and probably many people from other countries do not expect us to know their language. Still, I think you can gain a little extra respect if you learn and use a few basic phrases of the language of the country you are visiting.

      There is a lot of great music that you can hear when traveling that you almost never hear when at home,

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  5. I have always wanted to speak French and Italian and German. My son told me a pretty funny story last night. He is currently doing an internship in counseling at a small college counseling center in eastern ND. He learned yesterday that he needed to develop a more varied language for affirmations in therapy, since he has a tendency of saying “K” as in OK, but that doesn’t work so well when the clients are from Mexico and it sounds like he is saying “Que” which means “What?” in Spanish. Thanks for taking care of the glossary, ladies.

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  6. Yay, wikiwalk made the list! I’m so proud ;-). My list of desired languages changes with my interests/fandoms. While I was learning yoga I wished I knew Sanskrit, when I was deeply into anime I longed for fluency in Japanese, other times I’ve been enamored of Icelandic, Chinese, Italian, ancient Greek, Latin and Gaelic. The only language I keep coming back to is, and you may laugh if you like, Esperanto. Not only was it the ultimate geek hobby before Klingon was developed (Forry Ackerman was a big supporter; I got a handful of his books off Ebay after he died), but I have a soft spot in my soul for Zamenhof’s “interna ideo” of worldwide understanding and peaceful dialogue (he really dedicated his life to his language and to international peace, and died of exhaustion and a broken heart during the Great War). I’m nowhere near disciplined enough to be fluent even in the easiest language ever created, but it’s always in my “someday” plans, as in “Next time I get laid off I’ll make some real progress in Esperanto,” or “when I retire I’ll study up on Esperanto and use the Passport Service (travel network) to see the world.” Cu vi parolas la esperanton, mi amikoj?

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  7. I’d like to learn Spanish. My neighborhood has a lot of native Spanish speakers, and I sometimes feel left out. Our local newspaper comes in an English and a Spanish version, I try to read both. There’s a good chance that we’ll be going to Mexico again in February and I’m determined to know just a bit more than I did last year. When you’re off the beaten path, like the small fishing village where we stay, few of the locals speak English, so knowing some Spanish is a big plus. I love languages!

    Thanks for updating the glossary, BiR, nice job.

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  8. I wish I would have continued my Russian studies…and I’d like to learn Italian (so I can understand opera without the supertitles), and Norwegian because it is the language of my ancestors. Chinese and Spanish would both be useful (and there are times when it would also be handy to know at least a few words in Somali).

    Thanks for the updated glossary. I had forgotten about “ingrown narcissism”. 🙂

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      1. Thanks for the birthday wishes – out for dinner last night to the local Italian place (penne with gorgonzola – yum!), dinner again tonight with my mom (at our regular spot – they have the best bread pudding ever), more celebrations this weekend…giant balloon in my cube today at work from my bestest pal (who happens to work just across the floor from me and delivered it while I was off at a meeting). Oh, and I have a new book to pick up for myself on my way home by Jo Nesbo (another of his Norwegian mysteries has been translated to English…hmmm…another reason to learn Norwegian – so I can read his books without having to wait…).

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      4. Hey, happy birthday to you, too, Beth-Ann, two days late. I wasn’t paying attention on Sunday. What did you do for fun?

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      6. And to Beth Ann – in the words of Pooh Bear, as transcribed by Owl and translated by A.A. Milne, “HIPY PAPY BTHETHDTH THUTHDA BTHUTHDY.” (a couple of days late) Hope it was grand.

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  9. I used to have a seasonal job in a florist shop, where I tried to pick up a little Spanish, so I could spell the card messages correctly. I can spell a few things, like “un beso cariñoso para ti”, and maybe even get the words in the right order. The past three years my volunteer job has been doing tax preparation for a clientele that includes many Spanish-speakers, but that’s been like starting over from scratch – there’s very little overlap in vocabulary between love and taxes. Every time I have to go get the site manager to translate I feel like the most helpless person on the planet.

    The gender of the nouns is a big stumbling block for me – makes me think of David Sedaris in Me Talk Pretty One Day, where he tells about going to the market in France and asking for everything in twos, so he won’t need to know the correct gender, which works for him until he gets a huge accumulation of food and the refrigerator fills up, because he always has to ask for two whole chickens, two melons, two pounds of tomatoes, etc.

    In Spanish a tax return is feminine, by the way, and a paycheck is masculine.

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    1. “there’s very little overlap in vocabulary between love and taxes” sounds like something I should add to my Quotes list.

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  10. I’m thinking we could also use this day to think up some new Baboon words. VS noted that we really don’t have something for attributing something to the wrong babooner. Ectopic just refers to wrong placement…

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    1. Is that right? it’s not possible to double post?

      I just looked up top and it’s still in the original, and I see Dale has already added these new ones. Go up right under Blevens and click on Glassary.

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  12. I honestly think that once I had one language under control, I would want to learn another.

    I firmly believe that we learn another language, not so much to be understood (that is relatively easy, if you don’t mind looking a little silly and waving your hands about a good bit), as to understand.

    I had a German friend who knew at least 5 languages fluently-she confirmed my suspicion that some ideas are better conveyed in one language than in others. Sure, you can get translations, but for real wordsmiths like A.A. Milne and Mark Twain, it just doesn’t cut it. I have no doubt that the same can be said for authors who write in languages I have little facility with.

    Then there is poetry and flow. Singing Latin church music in English (modified for political correctness and inclusiveness no less), not. a. fan.

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      1. Don Quixote does not make sense?

        I would say in that case, you would need Castillian or something of that ilk, just like reading Shakespeare if you sort of have a working knowledge of American English, you wonder what the fuss is about. (I don’t like to read Shakespeare, but will watch it with joy).

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  13. Very funny, BiR! Great job on the compilation. You’ve gone the extra mile down the Baboon Trail!

    I still want to learn Latin. I took four years of German in high school, then tried French in college. French didn’t work out very well for me. When asked a question en Francais, my answers always came out in German. I suppose it could be the Schaumkessel in me… 🙂

    Latin just seems to make sense to me, perhaps because it’s the source of so much in our language, or perhaps because I’m the daughter of doctors. Even though I’ve never taken it, I enjoy reading Latin and trying to parse out the meaning without any aid.

    But I can’t be asked to work too hard on learning anything these days: “In vino veritas!”

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    1. I took Latin in high school (only the second girl to do all 4 years; everyone else took German). I rather enjoyed it even though the teacher was somewhat inert; it was like having a secret language club, which might be part of my attraction to Esperanto. I still think English could use an accusative case! I have a friend who spent a few years in Germany as an Air Force brat, and when she was living in California and would be spoken to in Spanish, her answers tended to come out in German too. They were also stationed in England, and to this day she has trouble spelling because both the British and American versions of words look correct to her–not much of a problem, you’d think, unless like her you work in the acquisitions department of a university library.

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  14. German for my heritage.
    Finnish for the lilt of the language.
    But Spanish for the practicality of it, living here where we do and with our son in CA. Our daughter-in-law grew up in southern San Diego and loves everything Mexican, but oddly speaks nary a word of it.
    We were in a restaurant last night. A two-year-old girl was trying to attract my deaf wife’s attention. She kept saying “Hola.” So she switched to “Hi.” When my wife went over to talk to her, she started in Spanish and then switched to English. Thus should we all have been raised.

    Where’s Steve?

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      2. If this persists you need to get a computer microphone and that speech-to-text software, like Kevin Kling uses.

        OT, yesterday RH played that song about the little-ass birds.

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  15. I’m so sorry, Steve.

    WOT – Just checked the forecast, and so far Sunday weather looks good for Blevins (hey, is it Blevins or Blevens?) Book Clubbing, at least some sun and low seventies.

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      1. I took intro to Sign Language and Intro to Spanish at the same time. I was not proficient at either. When folks don’t understand my Spanish I tend to use my hands even more than usual, but it doesn’t help. I really like sign language and wish I were fluent. The deaf woman who works here is very tolerant and often corrects me. But I am getting good enough to make her laugh when I want to.

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  16. My favorite would be something Gaelic – is Welsh considered Gaelic – I would just love to figure out how to pronounce all those strings of consonants. And there are others mentioned above that I had not thought of – Icelandic, which would probably sound close to Norwegian? Castillian sounds intriguing,Klingon… And sign language. Better get busy…

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  17. WOT, My husband saw a weasel hiding in our garage this afternoon. It is the second weasel sighting in the neighborhood this week. It makes me a little nervous. I know that they are small but vicious.

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  18. Hmm…Now that you mention it, they are doing a big legislative redistricting move in ND right now, so it would be a good time to stake a political claim. I will have to keep an eye on this developing situation.

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    1. As a baboon I think you are obligated to chase the weasel all around the cobbler’s bench-I hope you have an appropriate bench in your garage.

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  19. ewhat was the charlameign quote
    ‘I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men and German to my horse’ (attributed to Charles V)

    fun day all

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