Today’s topic is dumb names for things.

Things are everywhere in our lives. Did you ever notice that? I mean, everywhere you look these days, you’ll see things. In fact, the first thing you saw when you opened your foggy little newborn eyes was probably a thing. And you will undoubtedly see a thing of some sort in that second right before you die, too.

Just try to avoid things—ha ha, good luck, sucker! You can’t. It is totally impossible to avoid coming in contact with things.

The word “thing” is always a good stand-in when you are either too naïve, uneducated or too lazy to say the actual phrase you should be saying. Writers should never describe anything as a “thing.” For example, this would be poor writing: “He sat on one of those things they deliver milk in.” Of course, this is bad for a lot of reasons, but the most glaring one is the fact that the stupid author couldn’t bother to say “milk crate” because this writer was probably high or drunk, or Appalachian. (No true disrespect is meant to any Appalachians who are reading this… hey, if you are reading this, you are not the type of Appalachian I am talking about anyway, you literate bastard you!)

On a funny sidenote, when I was younger I thought the word was Apple-Asian. I pictured a little Macintosh with slanty eyes, a Fu Manchu mustache and a very stereotypical Chinaman hat. And I would giggle to myself. Asian apples cracked me up. They kinda still do. I’m an idiot. “I a reary, reary good source of fiber!”

Anyway, back to whatever it was I was attempting to say about things.

Some things have names that are misleading, nonsensical or just plain embarrassing. Here’s a few I can think of really fast, since I need to get back to my work here before I get fired:


Lazy Susan: It’s that little spinny plate that sits on the table, holding items such as napkins, condiments, and sometimes little Lego men. But why would anyone call this item lazy? The thing is moving and staying active, for crying out loud. If anything is lazy, it’s those motionless dinner and salad plates. Stupid non-spinning plates, just laying there letting people dump food all over them. So lazy.

And I won’t even get into the whole Susan issue. If I had been in charge of naming this thing, I’d have called it the Rotating Ashley. But that’s just me.

Cubby hole: I’m well aware that anytime I type anything with the word “hole” it can immediately be thought of as something with a sexual connotation. And I’d bet money that “cubby hole” is actually slang for something sexy. The problem is I am, like the dinner plate, too lazy to do a search to find this out. So the meaning of “cubby hole” I am talking about is the one that had to do with the coat hooks at elementary schools.

I always remember teachers saying things like, “Now go put your lunch box back in the cubby hole” and “Don’t push Marvin into the cubby hole, young lady” and “Cubby holes are not for doing number one or number two in.” The cubby holes were little nooks (GOD, that’s another word that is stupid as hell! Nook. It’s just as bad as its evil sibling, Crannies. In all my years of devouring English Muffins, never ONCE did I witness a nook, or a cranny. It was just the inside of a muffin, damn it.) that were near the coat area in the back of the classroom, and it was where you were supposed to store your hats, mittens, lunchboxes and possible show and tell item. (Like your grandfather's probably-much-needed diabetes testing kit, which one kid did actually bring to school one day.)

My problem with “cubby” holes is they make me think of the old, original Mickey Mouse Club. The two littlest Mouseketeers were named Cubby and Karen. I don’t know why I knew this, even as a little kid, but I did, and I always wondered why they named the holes in the coat area after a little kid from the 1950s.

By the way, a surefire way to make my sister laugh is to bring up Cubby and Karen. I don’t know why. I bet she’s laughing right now, thinking of those two little imps.

Weakfish: I bring this up because Lani posted about the “slippery dick” today; which is, apparently, a type of fish. What an unfortunate name for that little fella, huh? All the female fish swim a safe distance from ol’ slippery dick. He never has a chance. The ladies want a dick that can finish the job, not slip on out like a summer sausage in the hands of an oily Hickory Farms employee. Gah. This whole thing about a fish named the slippery dick is making me a little nauseous, so I must move on.

My contribution to the weird fish names is the Weakfish. They used to advertise the party fishing boats in Atlantic Highlands with the types of fish they went out to catch; flounder was a big one. But then you’d see “Weakfish” sometimes, and I would always wonder to myself: where is the sport in catching a weakfish? What, are they so weak they can hardly manage to swim around or something? How the hell could evolution allow something like a weakfish to make it this far? I’m thinking the guys who fish for weakfish would also be in for canned hunts where they can shoot a deer that’s in a cage. They also probably married the easy chick from high school, too. Hey, why work for anything, you know? When there are weak things out there, go get ‘em.

For a brief time, I thought that maybe it wasn’t “weakfish” at all, but “we-ACK fish,” thinking there was a fancy-schmancy way of pronouncing it or something. We-ACK is Hawaiian for the Racing Waters, or something like that. I scrapped those thoughts when I grew up and learned life is not one big case of mispronunciation.

Dumbbells, dumb waiters: What the hell is a dumb bell? It doesn’t look like a bell (well, maybe those old-timey triangular ones they used at the Turn of the Century were sorta bell shaped, but still—you can’t ring it so why call it a bell?) and there’s no reason at all to call it dumb. That’s just mean, is what that is. “You stupid sonofabitch, you dumbbell. You’re so dumb you’re not even a bell, that’s how dumb you are.” See how awful that sounds? Poor dumb bells. Give them a break.

And again, what the hell is a dumb waiter? Yeah, I know it’s one of those “things” in the wall in rich people’s houses where you can put some stuff, like ham, on the plate and use some sort of pulley system to raise the plate of ham up to another floor of the house. Dumb waiters could transport ham all day, and would do it without complaining like a real-life waiter. You wouldn’t have to give a dumb waiter any legally-required breaks or anything. Just work it till it breaks, basically.
But wouldn’t a better name be something like “Food Elevator”? Just because something is an inanimate object doesn’t mean it is dumb. Sure, it can’t speak and say things like, “I hate the smell of rotten eggs” or do some math. But a dumb waiter is kind of a functioning thing, doing a job for the spoiled upper class, and shouldn’t just be called stupid, or any other word you want to switch out for dumb.

It’s because we insist on calling things by names like dumbwaiter that people from other countries think we are idiots.

I could go on and on, because there are so many names for things that I don’t understand, but alas, the shadows grow long on the ground and the e-mail alerts continue to pop up like so many pimples; I can only ignore them for so long before I open them up. So I must retire now, and think of more things.