Tuesday, January 11, 2005

Smurfing a New Habit

As some of you may have noticed, I am fond of words. One of my favorite games inside my head is to deliberately choose a word that is not the most obvious word choice (i.e. "let's go procure a caffeinated beverage" instead of "let's get some coffee"). It doesn't have to be a bigger word necessarily, just a word most people wouldn't think to use. I fancy myself a walking Thesaurus. I do this because it entertains me, it forces me to exercise my vocabulary, and it irritates the tar out of Mary. Mary calls me "word snob".

I also have this list of words I like. They are words I want to use, but I never remember them when the situation calls for it. One of these words is "Smurf". I was a huge Smurf fan growing up (I tried to get my friend Sandi to name her cat Asriel, until Mary went and told her it was the name of an evil Smurf eating cat). One of the things I liked best about the Smurfs is that they managed to replace just about every verb or adjective in the show with the word "Smurf". This makes no sense, but is hilarious. Some examples:

I'm going to go smurf a beer after work.

Are you smurfing that guy?

What a smurfy car you have Amber!

I finally remembered to start using it today, and it caught on really fast. Mary and Bia are both smurfing it up left and right. It shows up a couple of times in my previous post as well. So far I've been really pleased with the results. However, Mary pointed out today a potential flaw in my plan. Sometimes I get into this thing where I get stuck on a word or phrase and start using it excessively. This has happened with "hilarious", "bizarre", "it's hard to say", "potentially", "true that" and "I'm going to kick you right in the nuts" (used mainly on Tim, for the record I have never made good on that threat). I have to be careful about that happening with "smurf", because there are many situations where that will not go over very well. For instance, it would be bad for me to go to my interview on Friday and accidentally say "It was easy to get here, I just smurfed the red line." Also, if I ask my bartender to smurf me another beer on Saturday, he's likely to smurf me over the head instead. And of course I would be mortified if I ever said this in bed, i.e. "Yeah baby, smurf me!" So I'm going to have to be careful about smurfing "smurf" too much. On the other hand, it might be a good thing to add to the list of Ways To Get Annoying Guys in Bars to Go Away that Mary and I have recently been experimenting with. I'll let you know how it goes.

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