This Week in Word of the Day – 08/11/13
hyperhidrosis \hahy-per-hi-DROH-sis\, noun:
abnormally excessive sweating.
Dentistry was not a wise professional choice for a man that suffered so tragically with hyperhidrosis. Despite liberal applications of industrial strength deodorant, the poor dentist simply couldn’t get out ahead of his perspiration problems and his clinic quickly folded.
Distraught and heartbroken, the dentist moved into the veterinarian field where the patients lacked the ability to complain of his foul odor and unsightly pit stains, yet the sight of inhumane canines and molars never fulfilled the man.
On a whim, the dentist asked a mortician about dental care for the deceased. Though there was little need for cavity repair and root canals, the mortician told the dentist that developing a pleasant, comfortable smile for the corpse was a hot, new trend among funeral homes. Yet, preparing the teeth was a vexing problem for which mortuary school left them completely ill-equipped and most resorted to White Out.
Here is where the poor dentist found his calling and it is also within the mortuary dental sciences where he discovered his one and only true love and greatest competitor, Mary Belle Worthington — also known as the Matisse of Corpse Beautification.
eyetooth \AHY-tooth\, noun:
1. Dentistry. a canine tooth of the upper jaw: so named from its position under the eye.
idiom:
1. cut one’s eyeteeth, a. to gain sophistication or experience; become worldly-wise. b. Also, cut one’s eyeteeth on. to be initiated or gain one’s first experience in (a career, hobby, skill, etc.).
2. give one’s eyeteeth, to give something one considers very precious, usually in exchange for an object or situation one desires: She would give her eyeteeth for that job.
Yanking out the eyeteeth as a preventative measure for witchcraft began like all other customs in the sad, little town — at the behest of a charismatic, and quite insane, town elder.
Over the centuries, the townspeople collected brutal, bizarre, and ineffective traditions like most cultures collect sports stars. For 152 years, the town drowned every 73rd child, believing it to be the Antichrist. For 86 years, all cats with black fur, but a white tail were forced to wear satin mittens to prevent them from waking the dead. For 327 years, when a game of chess ended in a stalemate, both players were forcibly shaved bald just to show that quitting was not an acceptable solution to any problem. For thirteen months, when a husband was found in the bed of another woman, he was forced to wear only a diaper for two weeks. For the entire life of the town, a group of children acted out a volcanic disaster on the outskirts of town every night to prevent an eruption, despite the complete absence of volcanoes in their part of the country.
Needless to say, the tourism industry was the town’s chief economy.
holograph \HOL-uh-graf, -grahf, HOH-luh-\, adjective:
1. wholly written by the person in whose name it appears: a holograph letter.
noun:
1. a holograph writing, as a deed, will, or letter.
William never considered that Jesus of Nazareth was literate until the moment he was told of the letters buried deep within the Holy See of Vatican City.
The middle-aged cardinal from Ireland was in line to take over the Vatican’s secret archive, including the earliest church writings. He was first told of the side room hidden behind a book cabinet as a place to be ignored.
“Merely a safe room to hide the most valuable documents should the worst come about,” his mentor advised him, yet never told him how to open the room.
William never thought much about it, but as his mentor’s failing health worsened and bouts of pneumonia brought the mentor to the edge of death, word came down from the archbishop that William’s time had come.
William sat in the archival office as he tried not to listen to his mentor protesting vigilantly against William’s exposure to whatever was hidden in the secret room.
At first, letters from the Savior took on a similar appeal as any sliver of writing from an historic figure. The significance was not lost on William, but he did not anticipate reading anything truly moving or disturbing. More likely correspondence with the apostles or perhaps his mother.
But the way William’s mentor fought to keep William out of the room was both troubling and insulting.
“I am not a child with a fragile faith,” William thought, growing more agitated by the moment.
The office door swung wide and banged against a book case, startling William. The mentor said nothing, only glared.
William stood, turning his eyes from the mentor to the archbishop standing behind him.
“Congratulations,” the archbishop said with a smile. “Only 203 human beings have seen what you are about to hold in your hands.”
The archbishop nodded to his advisers and the group shuffled out of the archive.
The mentor huffed, then turned away from William. They walked silently to the secret entrance of the room.
“Pay attention,” the mentor grunted. “I will show you how to open the door once only.”
William nodded and watched the old man’s hands. The mentor brushed his fingers along the spines of ancient books on thirteenth century church doctrine.
The mentor sighed and glanced back at William.
“Steel yourself,” the mentor whispered. “You will regret this day for the rest of your life.”
waif \weyf\, noun:
1. a person, especially a child, who has no home or friends.
2. something found, especially a stray animal, whose owner is not known.
3. a stray item or article: to gather waifs of gossip.
4. Nautical. waft.
The waif found solace in dead things. Spiders, mice, pigeons, flies, anything that lacked the ability to abandon him. He learned early on that time removed the dead piece by piece, but with furry things, there remained a skeleton.
And these became his friends.
Sewer workers would stumble upon the boy’s piles of bones from time to time, left out in rays of sunlight breaking into the subterranean world. The sewer workers, not realizing the bones were bleaching, would instead whisper about some mysterious beast roaming the underworld.
A decade went by with the waif never glimpsing another human being, but collecting bones of all manner of animals that either lived and died in the sewer or were tossed in for easy disposal.
When the waif, now a full-grown and lonely man, did finally come across one of his own kind, it was a thin and cold Hispanic woman. Young, beautiful, dead. The man had perfected the method of using the microbial life of the sewer to strip the flesh, but preserve the bone. The skeleton was perfect and baked in the summer sun to a gleaming white.
He made the woman his queen, sitting aloft a throne constructed from all of the world’s creatures. The man spoke to her in a language of his own devising, shared stories of his long, productive days, and sat meals out for her that she could never eat.
As the man laid to sleep in their bedroom chamber, moonlight stretching a silver finger through a vent to brush light against his queen’s visage, he prayed to the God he remembered from his early days above ground. He asked the God to give his Queen life, a voice, even just a turn of the head. The God felt for the man, granting his desperate wish, and humanity entered its final nightmare.
finagle \fi-NEY-guhl\, verb:
1. to trick, swindle, or cheat (a person) (often followed by out of): He finagled the backers out of a fortune.
2. to get or achieve (something) by guile, trickery, or manipulation: to finagle an assignment to the Membership Committee.
3. to practice deception or fraud; scheme.
Lindy got it into her head at the beginning of her eighth grade year that she would finagle a date out of Roger Oscarson by the end of the semester. It might seem unreasonable for a mousy and bookish teacher’s pet to land the most popular boy in school, but here is what you need to know about Lindy:
1. At three years old, she successfully framed her older sister for petty theft at a shopping mall as revenge for hogging the television the night before.
2. At seven, she organized a successful coup at a bible camp in eastern Oklahoma so overwhelming that all teenagers and adults were forcibly exiled. Thirty-two law enforcement officials were rushed in to secure the perimeter while the governor negotiated with Lindy for a conditional surrender.
3. At nine, she fixed the mayoral race in her bedroom community in exchange for a massive order of Girl Scout cookies.
4. On her twelfth birthday, she hacked into the Presidential agenda to redirect his motorcade from the state capital to her birthday party at the trampoline park.
5. For her thirteenth birthday, she walked the red carpet at the Academy Awards despite not ever appearing, producing, or having the slightest hand in a motion picture. No one caught on she was crashing the party and her image was even featured in the photo spread in Entertainment Weekly.
So, Roger Oscarson was correct to be terrified.
helter-skelter \HEL-ter-SKEL-ter\, adverb:
1. in headlong and disorderly haste: The children ran helter-skelter all over the house.
2. in a haphazard manner; without regard for order: Clothes were scattered helter-skelter about the room.
adjective:
1. carelessly hurried; confused: They ran in a mad, helter-skelter fashion for the exits.
2. disorderly; haphazard: Books and papers were scattered on the desk in a helter-skelter manner.
Randy always believed he would be the one to stop a shooting rampage, never the maniac behind one. That is why he carried his beretta to public events, why he fine-tuned his Muay Thai, why he kept a bullet-proof vest and smoke grenades in his trunk. He was waiting to be a hero.
The fear crept in shortly after the elections. His parents lost their land to the bank. The radio barked about revolution. The pastor railed about “us” and “them”. The news show host started questioning loyalties.
His wife left, like a bird fleeing a coming storm, but she soon came back with the court documentation to prove the house was now hers.
The dreams were different now, the ones when he was half-awake and lucid. Where the faces in the crosshairs were once terrorists and drug dealers, they were now politicians and activist judges. The meaning of “hero” was changing, being mutated by the hate and fear radiating from his heart.
He sought justice on a sweltering summer afternoon. He emerged helter-skelter from his small, mildewed apartment with layers of body armor and ammunition wrapped around him so tight that it was almost impossible to open his car door and lower into the driver’s seat.
He took back roads to the court house to avoid the police and sat in his car for an hour planning his route. He thought nothing of escape. The hurt fell over his future like a dark curtain.
The first shot was in the lobby and spat out from his modified breach gun. It flew high above the young woman’s head and ripped out a chunk of wood paneling and dry wall behind her. He absorbed the jolt of the shotgun, the terrific blast, the chaos of the crowd, the security guards whipping around and fumbling for their sidearms. The hate drained out his pores. A silence spread into its place. The next shot from the breach gun crashed through Randy’s skull, shattering his mind and extinguishing the hurt before it could infect anyone else.
Randy always believed he would be the hero to stop a shooting rampage, and he was right.
kloof \kloof\, noun:
(in South Africa) a deep glen; ravine.
Deep within the rocky kloof that led to the fire pits of Hell, the pilgrims heard God calling desperately. Castaway by the Dark One during the End of Days, God was trapped within the scorched and shattered Earth. The Book said God lost because of His ego. In truth, it was His omnipotence that was his downfall.
“He sees everything, and because of this, He sees nothing,” the Dark One told the media networks following the bloody war.
The pilgrims wept at the mouth of the deep gash cut into the landscape, smelling the sulfur waft up in warm breezes. The snarl-toothed demon with twisted horns sprouting from his head coughed a polite reminder that the line was not getting any shorter. The pilgrims dried their eyes and dropped olive branches down into Hell.
Again, they heard God call to them, voice weakened by the eternal torment. The pilgrims lowered their heads in shame and turned away from their Creator.
