Skip to main content

Dinkum's definitions

snarf

A guy who derives pleasure from running around sniffing girls' bicycle seats. (Not to be confused with a "twerp").
"Do you know what a twerp is? When I was in Shortridge High School in Indianapolis 65 years ago, a twerp was a guy who stuck a set of false teeth up his butt and bit the buttons off the back seats of taxicabs. (And a snarf was a guy who sniffed the seats of girls' bicycles.)

-- Kurt Vonnegut, in "A Man Without a Country".
by Dinkum August 13, 2013
mugGet the snarf mug.

fartspeak

A voluble, involuntary speech impairment that the political animal inflicts upon his hearing audience. When asked for the truth, he invariably responds with bullshit -- i.e., "fartspeak," which is usually not so elevated a form of discourse as to qualify either as "bullshit artistry" or as "spin doctoring."
EXAMPLE:

"This is a guy who does congressional hearings, said Cessy. "I'm surprised he's letting it get under his skin."

"It's because he's lying," said Reuben.

"Oh, come on. Like they { the military brass } don't lie to Congress."

"They { these military asshats } spin to Congress."

"Well, he's spinning this, too, isn't he? 'I'm sure it's just a misunderstanding.' That's FARTSPEAK for 'I said it, you jerk, but you weren't supposed to tell.'"

"'Fartspeak'?"

"That's what we called it on the hill { Capitol Hill }, said Cessy.

-- Orson Scott Card, in "Empire", Chapter 10 -- "Fair and Balanced", on page 140.
by Dinkum September 4, 2013
mugGet the fartspeak mug.

stork

(1) ' n. A large wading bird with long legs and a long beak of the family Ciconiidae. ' -- Wiktionary

(2) ' According to European folklore, the stork is responsible for bringing babies to new parents. The legend is very ancient, but was popularised by a 19th-century Hans Christian Andersen story called "The Storks". '

-- Wikipedia { en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Stork#Storks_and_childbirth }
EXAMPLE:

' Harry's wife, Grace, was stretched out on a chaise longue . . . She was smoking a small cigar in a long holder made from the legbone of a stork. A stork was a large European bird, about half the size of a Bermuda Ern. Children who wanted to know where babies came from were sometimes told that they were brought by storks. People who told their children such a thing felt that their children were too young to think intelligently about {sex}.

' And there were actually pictures of storks delivering babies on birth announcements and in cartoons and so on, for children to see . . .

' Dwayne Hoover and Harry LeSabre saw pictures like that when they were very little boys. They believed them, too. '

-- From Kurt Vonnegut's 1973 novel "Breakfast of Champions" -- Chapter 15 (pages 162 - 163).
by Dinkum August 28, 2013
mugGet the stork mug.

Founding Fathers

(1) According to Kurt Vonnegut, the Founding Fathers were marauding "sea pirates" (read: white Europeans), who "founded" new nations in North, Central, and South America by displacing or exterminating the indigenous inhabitants.

(2) ' The Founding Fathers of the United States of America were political leaders and statesmen who participated in the American Revolution by signing the United States Declaration of Independence, taking part in the American Revolutionary War, and establishing the United States Constitution.

' Many of the Founding Fathers owned African American slaves, and the Constitution adopted in 1787 sanctioned the system of slavery.

' Some historians define the "Founding Fathers" to mean a larger group, including not only the Signers and the Framers but also all those who, whether as politicians, jurists, statesmen, soldiers, diplomats, or ordinary citizens, took part in winning American independence and creating the United States of America.' -- Wikipedia
EXAMPLE:

' A lot of the nonsense was the innocent result of playfulness on the part of the founding fathers. But some of the nonsense was evil, since it concealed great crimes. For example, {U. S.} teachers wrote this date on blackboards again and again, and asked the children to memorize it with pride and joy:

' = 1492 =

' The teachers told the children that this was when their continent was discovered by human beings. Actually, millions of human beings were already living full and imaginative lives on the continent in 1492. That was simply the year in which sea pirates began to cheat and rob and kill them.

' Here was another piece of evil nonsense which children were taught: that the sea pirates eventually created a government which became a beacon of freedom to human beings everywhere else. There were pictures and statues of this supposed imaginary beacon for children to see. It was sort of an ice-cream cone on fire.

' Actually, the sea pirates who had the most to do with the creation of the new government owned human slaves. They used human beings for machinery.

' The sea pirates were white. The people who were already on the continent when the pirates arrived were copper-colored. When slavery was introduced onto the continent, the slaves were black.

' Color was everything. '

-- From Kurt Vonnegut's 1973 novel "Breakfast of Champions" -- Chapter 1 (page 10 - 11).
by Dinkum August 21, 2013
mugGet the Founding Fathers mug.

Armistice Day

November 11, formerly observed in the United States in commemoration of the signing of the armistice ending World War I in 1918. Since 1954 it has been incorporated into the observances of Veterans Day.

-- American Heritage Dictionary, 4th Edition
EXAMPLE:

"So this book is a sidewalk strewn with junk, trash which I throw over my shoulders as I travel in time back to November eleventh, nineteen hundred and twenty-two.

"I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy . . . all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

"It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.

"Armistice Day has become Veterans' Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans' Day is not.

"So I will throw Veterans' Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep. I don't want to throw away any sacred things.

"What else is sacred? Oh, "Romeo and Juliet", for instance.

"And all music is."

-- From Kurt Vonnegut's 1973 novel "Breakfast of Champions" -- Preface (page 6).
by Dinkum September 3, 2013
mugGet the Armistice Day mug.

Coprolaliac

A person suffering from or subject to coprolalia, the obsessive and uncontrollable use of scatological language. (Compare with such like back-formations as insomnia and insomniac; hypochondria and hypochondriac; coprophagia and coprophagiac; coprophilia and coprophiliac).
The "jailin' it" droopy-drawers doofus was a COPROLALIAC: he suffered from "the Black man's disease", the utter inability to assemble even the simplest English sentence without lavishly larding his utterances with a plethora of "fuckers", "motherfuckers", "motherfucking", . . . and, well, you get the picture. It was almost as if "motherfucker" was the only word he knew and he was bound and determined to make the most of it -- as a noun, a verb, an adjective, an adverb, an imperative, and, of course, as an interjection! Yeah, good ol' Droopy Drawers, he's cheesin' it as he's sleazin' it -- he's a real kool kitty, a regular "copro-cat".
by Dinkum September 2, 2013
mugGet the Coprolaliac mug.

Queen No-teef-ah

DEFINITIONS:

(1) Any toothless, crazy old bag lady who stumbles down the street yelling at passersby. She specializes in speaking to people no one else can see, sincerely believing all the while that she is completely capable of simultaneously addressing a "parliament" of owls, a "murder" of crows, AND a congress of crocodiles.

(2) By extension, any government official or self-appointed "authority" who says you must do something when they have only some toothless law or ordinance to back up their words. (Better do what I say, or I'll gum you to death!)
EXAMPLES:

(1) We met a crackhead in Cleveland who went by the name "Queen No-teef-ah."

(2) Last time I had a toothache I couldn't see a dentist. I had to get it pulled down at Killer County where they used what looked like the bone from a rat's rib to pry it out my mouth. Had two pulled since then, so now I feel like Queen No-teef-ah.

(3) Durham county has laws on the books requiring that all citizens and businesses recycle -- but seldom if ever are these laws enforced. So, without enforcement, these laws remain toothless, like crazy ol' Queen No-teef-ah. What do they plan to do, gum us to death?
by Dinkum March 5, 2014
mugGet the Queen No-teef-ah mug.

Share this definition

Sign in to vote

We'll email you a link to sign in instantly.

Or

Check your email

We sent a link to

Open your email