Words from Table Talk's "Five Words" Contest

sionnach When he reached puberty, the count made some drastic changes in his couture, with his signature cougarskin waistcoat, in particular, reaching new heights of couth; success with the ladies eluded him, however, due to his particularly irritating smoker's cough, the result of a two-pack a day habit since the age of seven. Jul 21, 2009

sionnach A dictionary is pretty essential. Unfortunately, over time the thread lapsed into neglect when one particular participant (not me) started to dominate by responding to any open challenge within 5 minutes (which effectively shut everyone else out) and then choosing five words so completely obscure that nobody had ever heard of them (like obsolete words found only in the OED that have not been in common use for hundreds of years). There's a level of difficulty where participating is a fun challenge, but if the challenge words are too simple or completely out there it is not that interesting. Jul 21, 2009

dontcry Day-amn! Are you allowed a dictionary?? Scratch paper?? Jul 21, 2009

sionnach To those detractors who charge that the shuttered downtown storefronts represent the detritus of late 20th century capitalism, I could write whole paragraphs in refutation of such claptrap, but for parsimony of exposition will limit my rebuttal to pointing out that the skyrocketing number of visitors to Indiana's jewel, the Clabber Girl Museum, directly contradicts the image of Terre Haute as a city mired in urban decay. Jul 21, 2009

sionnach The approaching millennium had farrowed any number of weird phenomena, ranging from the indoctrination of muslim youth with tribal hatreds in the madrasahs of Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan to the validation of ufology as a scientific subdiscipline, but none of this would matter to Smiley, who had only three more minutes to live, and was already feeling the swelling in his weasand, a result of the ramekin of poisoned shrimp cocktail he had just ingested with such relish. Jul 21, 2009

sionnach As she pondered Heathcliff's desertion to the National Lampoon, Cathy became feverish, her lungs burning to the point of deliquescence, gasping for air like a dabchick in a coalmine, suffocated by the chokedamp; as she was about to prepare a soothing infusion of catechu, she realized it was not so much the loss of Heathcliff that caused her distress, but the fact that Garfield had burnt the lasagna yet again. Jul 21, 2009

sionnach The indolent sigillographer, by ignoring a key coronis on the papyrus found near the site in which the body had been tumulated, misattributed the document by about 300 years, a mistake which did not escape his captious critics. Jul 21, 2009

sionnach We were headed on the silk road, nearing Dunhuang, accompanied by Mahmout, our trusty shikari, when suddenly, upon spying one of the bizarre shen-like rocks that stud that barren area, the scrawniest dromedary began to stagger in an ever-widening circle, as if impelled by those shadowy forces of gyromancy for which the region is so famous, and - suddenly - we were afraid. Jul 21, 2009

sionnach Priscilla had always had a touch of Xanthippe about her when it came to Miles's ebrious tendencies, but selling all his stock in Lucent Technologies to invest in this quack scheme to manufacture a nostrum against baldness from argol drove her over the edge entirely. Jul 21, 2009

sionnach At times Vladimir took a certain Schadenfreude in Estragon's increasingly severe lethonomia, but things got rancorous when he found himself being awakened repeatedly out of his very pleasant state of hypnerotomachia just because E. had forgotten the word Zugzwang yet again. Apr 12, 2008

sionnach Accuse me of omphaloskepsis, and I must perforce admit "Peccavi!" - navelgazing is as much my defining vice as the kenspeckle stripe of the skunk - and yet, is there not as much truth to be found in introspection as in following the zetetic mode of the true seeker, or the aleatory caprices of the quincunx?
Apr 12, 2008

sionnach As he stood before the table, groaning under its weight of delicacies, a veritable panoply of excess, Psmith found himself stammering embarrassingly, as he tried to explain the presence of the ermine in the dumbwaiter, perhaps through some kind of Freudian association between the word "ermine" and the word "muff". Apr 12, 2008

sionnach Sam had already profited handsomely from the public's esurient craving for fresh Tickle-Me-Elmo paraphernalia, when he figured out a clever way of making "Elmo sampans" by deft evagination of old sporrans, and his market research team was already investigating potential demand for a series of "Elmo's Everest adventures" manufactured, using the best faux-samizdat techniques, to look like actual sherpa journals. Jan 3, 2008

reesetee Sionnach, these are all extraordinary. Jan 3, 2008

sionnach Arthur's life as an actuary was an ordered one - his work dealt with the empirical, the rational, and when work was done, there was nothing that pleased him more than to spend the evenings sequestered away from his fellow man, preparing his favorite delicacy of shark's fin soup, a state of affairs that changed considerably after his expert testimony at the trial of Paulina the punk pole dancer, who was suing her former employers for negligence, following a painful mishap involving a disco ball, a bottle of Kristall vodka and the bachelor party of his own nephew Arnold, about whose behavior the less said the better. Jan 3, 2008

sionnach Ireland is associated with harps and bogs, New Zealand with the kiwi, and Australia is inextricably linked in my mind with convicts and that porcine battleaxe with the wonderful bel canto voice, Dame Joan Sutherland.

disclaimer: I don't really think Joan Sutherland is a porcine battleaxe - but am claiming poetic license as my excuse. Jan 3, 2008

sionnach As the majestic initial chordal progression of Debussy's Submerged Cathedral filled the concert hall, evoking the faint sacerdotal chant of some ancient lacustrine brotherhood, Leopold looked at his wife's hugely tumescent belly, winced at the wave of pain that washed over his body in sympathetic contraction, and prayed that their health insurance was adequate to cover his-'n-her epidurals in cases of severe couvade. Jan 3, 2008

seanahan The one starting with "Given the atrocities" is a beautiful use of language. Jan 1, 2008

sionnach Ever since the accident with the machete, his decaudate companion had been restive, and prone to malarkey such as snatching Pierre's treasured oenological guide to the region, upon which he liked to chew, while remaining tantalizingly out of reach, prompting the Belgian to reflect that this was the absolute last trip he was going to take with a prepubescent monkey in tow, with or without an intact tail. Jan 1, 2008

sionnach Fatima was without doubt a paragon of pulchritude, but as she typed the incendiary message into her blackberry, while simultaneously using her glue-stick to tape a poison-pen note to her rival's locker, she proved once again that she was the unrivalled queen of mean at Tigris and Euphrates Junior High. Jan 1, 2008

sionnach Occasionally, two sets of challenge words back up, so that the requirement is to construct a sentence which uses 10 specified words, rather than just 5. Avoiding clunkiness in this situation is well-nigh impossible. For example:

Zoroaster contumely pettifogging tampon peripatetic faun caste domino starvation lamp


"Life as a supermodel was rough", thought Naomi, " to maintain membership in the caste required several hours a week under the tanning lamp, a near-starvation diet and peripatetic travel schedule sufficient to render tampons unnecessary, the need to maintain the grace of a faun, to satisfy the pettifogging requirements of diva designers and prickly photographers, or risk the vicious contumely of the fashblogistas, (one of whom had referred to her only last week as a 'disciple of Zoroaster, in the original sense, meaning 'owner of feeble camels'"),
and, recalling the humiliation, she reached over for another slice of Domino's. Jan 1, 2008

sionnach The gazebo, an exact replica of the Cinili Kiosk at the Topkapi, provided excellent protection against the steady defilade of the opposing team, so Reginald felt confident that he could lead his team to victory in the day's wargames, that is, until he made the connection between the gritty feeling in his shorts, the increasing burning sensation in his perineum, and the supercilious smirk on the face of Basil Ponsonby-Smith, the opposing team captain, who Reginald had found earlier in the day doing something furtive with a peppermill in the laundry room, at which point he let loose an involuntary howl of panic - "Nooooooooooo! Say iTAIN'T soooooooo!" Jan 1, 2008

sionnach It was Dick Dennison's doctoral dissertation : "The Damsel with the Dulcimer : Dreamscape or Dystopia?", as well as his dabblings in dendrochronology that had driven the devilish dominatrix Dora to disrupt his daily drive, diverting him down the dark, dizzying decline to her dungeon where, deliquescent with desire, douched, and decked out in her diaphanous dolman, Dora decocted another daiquiri and decided how she would deal with disobedient doctor Dick.
Dec 31, 2007

sionnach Given the atrocities that Mildred had perpetrated on the language during her first six months as president of the Ladies' skeet-shooting and mole-whacking club, the sentiment that her come-uppance was overdue flickered, smoldered, then erupted at the by-now-infamous June meeting wherein the other members voted unanimously to impeach her, then proceeded to pillory her mercilessly, with a ferocity the memory of which still causes some of the meeker members to blush with residual shame. Dec 31, 2007

sionnach As Sir Hosis took another swig of eau-de-vie, his pet kinkajou perched on his shoulder like a harbinger of doom, the xiphoid scar on his cheek throbbing as a reminder of previous battles, he cackled evilly: "Now that my brother is safely stashed in the oubliette, no need to wait for a quorum" and signed the order that consigned the prisoners to a painful death. Dec 31, 2007

sionnach As she shimmered down the red carpet like a mirage, bedecked and bedizened with bling, all eyes locked upon those fabled breasts, the effect was spoiled only by the wardrobe malfunction during which her right nipple escaped the confines of her Secret Embrace strapless demibra and popped out in search of air, like a prairie dog on patrol in the grand canyon, granting the assembled paparazzi, and estimated 500 million viewers at home, their first, and most memorable, nipslip of the evening. Dec 31, 2007