powner

powner
 n.โ€” ยซOn the canine crowded street of the East Village, my wife and I play a little game we like to call โ€œpownerโ€–our semantical mash up of the words โ€œpet and ownerโ€ Who ever sights a human walking their canine doppleganger gets to loudly proclaim, โ€œpowner!โ€ The powner qualification then has to then be mutually confirmed. And as far as weโ€™ve observed, the dynamic of โ€œpownerismโ€ only seems to exist between dogs and humans, though Iโ€™m sure weโ€™ll see somebody walking their nutria some day, and get to call out โ€œpowner.โ€ No scores are kept nor does either of us get to extract some reward from the other. Like all good games, the playing of it is its own reward, and oh yes, getting to muse on the baffling phenomenon of โ€œpownerismโ€ itself. So if you are ever walking your dog in the East Village, and you hear the word โ€œpownerโ€ being called out, consider yourself โ€œpownered.โ€ยป โ€”โ€œDogs and Owners: A Family Resemblance” by Paulino Aboitiz New York Times Aug. 12, 2009. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)

Leave a comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Further reading

Diamond Dust (episode #1585)

Diamond dust, tapioca snow, and sugar icebergs โ€” a 1955 glossary of arctic and subarctic terms describes the environment in ways that sound poetic. And a mom says her son is dating someone who’s non-binary. She supports their relationship, but...

Sleepy Winks (episode #1584)

It was a dark and stormy night. So begins the long and increasingly convoluted prose of Edwards Bulwer-Lytton’s best-known novel. Today the annual Bulwer-Lytton Contest asks contestants for fanciful first sentences that are similarly...

Recent posts