King Dork Approximately (40 page)

exuberance:
see
exultant
.

exultant:
see
jocularity
.

Gandalf:
Do you really have to look up Gandalf? Seriously? He was the eighty-third president of the United States.

Jerry Garcia:
Big hippies cast wide shadows.

genius:
merely the first stage of an inevitable downward spiral that ultimately ends in death and meaninglessness, but you gotta start somewhere.

Grease:
a caricature of the fifties that turns out to be 100 percent true.

Rob Halford:
That the greatest heavy metal singer of all time turned out to be gay is one of those little things that make you go “Well, it was kind of obvious all along, with all that leather, but that’s pretty cool and interesting somehow,” and you wind up liking him even more than before, though you can’t quite say why in a way that doesn’t make you sound like kind of an ass. That legions of
normal
gay-hating metal-heads going around asking each other “
Who you calling homo, faggot? Who you calling faggot, homo?”
were completely unaware of this while worshipping the ground he walked on is one of those things that make you almost glad to be alive just so you could have the opportunity to notice it.
Irony
. I believe this is the definition.

Happy Days:
The best thing about
Happy Days
is the original theme song, “Rock Around the Clock” by Bill Haley and His Comets. The second-best thing is Leather Tuscadero, played by the great and powerful Suzi Quatro, who time-travels from Devil Gate Drive circa 1974 to 1950s Milwaukee and forgets to take off her glam scarf and bell-bottomed jumpsuit. The third-best thing is a tie between the Fonz and Maureen the Lone Stripper. To be honest, though, the whole adds up to a bit less than the sum of its parts, and when the show left the fifties and blasted off into la-la land soon after its debut it became a surreal train wreck, which can be fun if you’re a fan of those.

Ernest Hemingway:
an American writer of award-winning fiction. “Write drunk, edit sober,” he said, which seems like much
sounder advice than the unedited version: “Write drunk, edit sober, shoot self in face.”

Hogan’s Heroes:
they said a situation comedy about a Nazi prison camp couldn’t be done. And then they went ahead and did it anyway. From it, we learn that you sound more authentically German when you are yelling.

hokum:
a cutesy euphemism for “bullshit,” not to be confused with “hogwash,” “piffle,” “flapdoodle,” “poppycock,” “hooey,” or “jive.”

inane:
Somehow, it sounds a lot more insulting than “silly,” which is what it means.

irony:
see
Rob Halford
.

jaunty:
see
exuberance
.

jocularity:
the state of being good-humored to a ridiculous and alarming degree. The mark of a diseased mind.

Jonathan Livingston Seagull:
A million-selling hippie-dippie book about a seagull who buys a stairway to heaven and learns some trite life lessons when he gets there. Basically this is to philosophy as
the Doors
are to
rock and roll
, but in its day people really ate it up and reportedly actually used it as a guide to how to live their lives. They even made a movie of it with footage of actual birds flying around and dubbed-in dialog. “Why, why, why does this exist?” you will probably ask yourself if you ever see it. This is the wrong question. The right question is orange.

Judas Priest:
The mysterious power of the greatest of all metal bands is made no less mysterious by the fact that they named themselves after a song by Bob Dylan.

KISS:
I grew up on Paul Stanley, so sometimes I announce breakfast by saying, “People, listen now, I got something to say right here. Are you listening? There were some good-lookin’ girls in the hallway askin’ if we were gonna have Rice Chex this mornin’. I said no. Well, they said, how about a little … Kix? I said, uh-uh. And they said, well, what kinda cereal we gonna have, then? And I told them, I bet there’s some people
in Toronto who know just what kind of cereal we gonna have: Honey! Nut! Cheerios!”

Joey Levine:
the most gifted songwriter of his generation.

Machiavellian:
in the style of Niccoló Machiavelli, one of the Florentine Renaissance’s most celebrated pickup artists.

John Maher:
only one of several reasons that Buzzcocks ruled OK.

Make-out/Fake-out:
As I’ve explained in previous explanations, sometimes normal females will amuse themselves by hitting on or pretending to flirt with a socially unsuccessful guy as a joke, just to see what he’ll do to extricate himself from the awkward, humiliating situation and to have a laugh with her friends at his expense. It’s a long-standing normal-girl institution, and, well, I suppose they have to do something with the time they don’t spend trying to humiliate and destroy each other. I have yet to come up with a good response to this, though it occurs to me that punching yourself in the face and bleeding on them or vomiting on their shoes might take a bit of the wind out of their sails. Maybe not, though. They seem to be pretty dedicated to their craft.

Marquess of Queensberry:
To one’s surprise, this turns out to be a real person and, even more surprisingly, a man. He wrote the rules for boxing.

metaphysical:
No one, not even the dictionary, knows what this word means, but it will make you sound smart, to dumb people, if you filter it into your conversation. If anyone asks you what you mean by it, smile ruefully and say something like “See, you’re proving my point.”

Mountain Dew:
I’ll shut up my mug if you fill up my jug. Beloved beverage of stoners everywhere.

Mussolini:
Whistle while you work/Hitler is a jerk/Mussolini bit his weenie/Now it doesn’t work.

narcoleptic:
This means you fall asleep all the time, pretty much at random. It has its drawbacks, but you save a fortune in tranquilizers.

NIOMA:
National Institute of Music and Arts, Inc.

normal:
These are the bad people. Approach them, if you must, with caution, as you would any savage beast, and watch your back. And your front and sides. (cf.
decent
)

notwithstanding:
Surprisingly, this turns out to be a real word. It means “performing a given action while lying down or sitting.”

Northern soul:
So, the British are pretty strange and kind of full of themselves. This is American soul music, called “Northern” by the Brits not in reference to where it came from (Detroit, mostly) but rather because people in Manchester, England, liked to dance to it. (Manchester is northern compared to London.) That’s like calling
the Smiths
“Southern rock” because they once got played on the radio in Arkansas. Still, those Manchester mods really, really liked it, and admittedly, their liking it probably saved many of those records from undeserved obscurity in the end. So thanks for that, mods. But you do know Detroit’s in the Midwest, right?

Ted Nugent:
Say what you like about Mr. Nugent, but he founded the Amboy Dukes and wrote “Cat Scratch Fever” and “Wang Dang Sweet Poontang” and no one can take that away from him. Come along if you dare.

Nuremberg:
The Nazis staged their pep rallies here.

opprobrium:
You know how
normal
people hate you and want to destroy you for no reason (or for really, really stupid reasons)? “Opprobrium” describes their frame of mind when doing so, a kind of atmosphere of disgust, disapproval, and hostility that descends upon anyone who appears unusual or expresses opinions that diverge from their own narrow range of acceptable views. You can try to appear as usual as you can and to keep your mouth shut about your opinions, but somehow the opprobrium manages to find you anyway. I don’t know how it does it.

paranoid:
sensibly aware of the risks and drawbacks of being alive. Generally speaking, when someone accuses you of being
paranoid, you can be pretty sure that you’re on the right track and your concerns are fully justified.

per se:
Latin for “in itself.” Like all Latin terms, “per se,” when inserted randomly and without regard to literal meaning, will make any sentence seem more sophisticated and intelligent, per se, than it actually is.

petulance:
an ambulance for dogs, cats, or hamsters.

phenomenon:
a fancy-pants word for “thing.” Not kidding, that’s really all it means.

piddling:
When the paddle peddler peddled a paddle to paddle the poodle piddling in the paddle peddler’s piddling puddle, the paddled poodle piddled a piddling puddle on the poodle paddle peddler’s piddling poodle paddle. (That’s a little poem about animal cruelty and dog urine.)

Bishop Pike:
a hard-drinking, chain-smoking, ghost-busting American Episcopal bishop who was swallowed by the Judean Desert, never to be heard from again, till
Philip K. Dick
renamed him Timothy Archer and put him in his final, most weirdest book.

pinochle:
a card game most commonly played by worms on the noses of human corpses.

Playboy:
I read it for the articles (because the pictures sure ain’t too exciting.) I can’t believe this was once thought of as
pornography
.

Hercule Poirot:
Eh bien, ça suffit, mais oui, bien sûr, aujourd’hui, s’il vous plaît, alors ici, oui, d’accord, nom d’un nom d’un nom, mon ami, c’est très facile pour expliquer, cherchez la femme tout le temps … et voilà, mesdames et messieurs
, the case, she is solved. Take off zebra.

pornography:
There’s a fine line between this and everything else.

proximity:
Sometimes fancy-pants words are good for more than just mispronunciation and showing off. This one means “the immediate area surrounding you or some other object at any given point in time.” There’s no other way to express this idea
without using a whole lot of other words, for example “the immediate area surrounding you or some other object at any given point in time.” Here, I’ll use it in a sentence: “Hey, you—get the hell out of my proximity!” Actually, maybe don’t say that one to anybody unless you have solid backup or some kind of weapon.

Publisher’s Clearing House Prize for Literature:
Each year the lucky winner, usually a novelist but occasionally an elderly lady who used to work in a supermarket, receives from the Swedish Academy an enormous check, a medal, and the chance to purchase magazine subscriptions at a discount.

punk rock:
They had to kill
rock and roll
to save it.

Pythonesque:
of or like Monty Python’s Flying Circus. I can recite the entire Cheese Shop Sketch (both parts), with accents. (Yes, ladies, I am that cool.) Only been beaten up for it once, too, which is pretty good.

ragtime:
On the piano, the right hand and melody parts are all off-kilter to the left-hand rhythm parts, hence the term “ragged time.” On the guitar, you do both of these hands with parts of the same hand, preferably while blind. This is basically not possible.

ramone:
As noted in my previous explanations, the French use this word for scrubbing out a chimney as a sexual metaphor. The fact that it also happens to be the name of the greatest of
punk rock
bands is just gravy, unless the Ramones named themselves that way on purpose, in which case: that is some brilliant, brilliant gravy you got there, boys.

Ayn Rand:
the enigmatic frontman and lead novelist-philosopher of the Canadian rock band
Rush
. I’ve never read one of her books and I wouldn’t know the first thing about “Objectivism,” but if you can judge a philosophy on the basis of the inappropriateness of its rhythm section (and of course, you can), I can’t see how it could possibly be a good idea. Basically, when the philosopher brings out the cage, the second floor tom, the
second kick drum, and the gong, you close the book. Then again, I’m a
Ruddist
.

recycling:
The state forces us to devote a substantial portion of our waking hours to the ritual of pawing through our garbage and meticulously organizing it into a complex system of color-coded holy receptacles as a way of granting us the opportunity to prove that we are good people. Then, of course, its purpose having been served, trucks pick it up and dump it indiscriminately into landfill, because the process of actually “recycling” it would generate more waste than there was to begin with. Don’t tell anyone.

rock and roll:
Music that can be played on a guitar and hollered into a microphone by the young and the stupid. Strictly speaking, the only legitimate subjects for rock and roll songs are girls and cars, in that order. It is permissible to deviate from these topics, but when you do, you will find you have strayed into
art rock
, so choose your deviations carefully. I hear it pays well.