After our conversation about a verbose admonition to use short words, a Tallahassee, Florida, man called with a version he learned as a boy: Do you have the audacity to doubt my veracity? Or even to insinuate that I would prevaricate? While I’ll thrust my phalanges into your physiognomy with such intensity that it will horizontalize your perpendicularity. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Horizontalize your Perpendicularity”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.
I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette.
A couple of weeks ago, we had a caller from Mammoth Lakes, California, who was telling us about her father giving her this advice to use small words, but he gave the advice in the form of really big words.
It started with promulgating your esoteric cogitations and it went on from there.
Yes, or articulating your superficial sentimentalities, blah, blah, blah.
But it basically boiled down to eschew obfuscation.
Don’t use long words.
Don’t use big words. Yes, exactly.
And that prompted a memory from Tommy Cogswell, who listens to us in Tallahassee, Florida.
And he recounted a story where he was going to the store every day and he would run into this older bully who would give him a hard time by using all these words that he didn’t understand.
And so Tommy went back to his mom and and dejectedly told her that there was this guy giving him a hard time with all these big words.
And so she gave him something to say back to this guy.
It goes, do you have the audacity to doubt my veracity or even to insinuate that I would prevaricate while I’ll thrust my phalanges into your physiognomy with such intensity that it will horizontalize your perpendicularity?
So other words, I’m going to punch you in the face and knock you down.
Yes, if you keep doing that.
If you keep calling me a liar.
Yeah.
And so the next day he goes to the store, runs into the guy.
Is the guy a kid?
He’s a high schooler.
High schooler.
And Tommy at the time was 9 or 10.
And so Tommy responded to the kids taunting with that phrase.
And the kid said, where did you learn that?
And he said, my mama told me to tell you that, Luther.
But it turns out that this was a little ditty that was going around in those days.
Very similar to the long word thing.
Yeah, that’s cool.
Yeah.
It was the meme of its era, as we said in that last call.
I know, right? Fight back against those bullies.
Well, this show is about all things related to language, and a lot of it has to do with memory and family and history and culture.
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