One of my less pleasing attributes is the absence of a neck. My head sits atop my shoulders. I once had a conversation with a coworker that went like this:
Me: Elysha and I fear the baby might have a huge head and no neck, just like its dad. Poor little thing.
Coworker: Don’t be silly. You have a neck.
Me: No, I really don’t. Just this big head stuck on a pair of shoulders.
Coworker: Don’t be ridiculous. Show me your neck.
Me: Huh?
Coworker: C’mon. Show me your neck.
Me: I am showing you my neck. What do you think I am? A turtle?
Coworker: No, I mean stretch your neck out.
Me: I am stretching my neck out. This is it. It’s all the neck I’ve got!
Coworker: Oh.
While it hasn’t bothered me much, a buddy sent me this from the Word of the Day website to mitigate my consternation.
WORD
argal
MEANING:
conjunction, adverb: Therefore.
ETYMOLOGY:
By alteration of the Latin ergo (therefore). The word argal is usually used to indicate that the reasoning presented is ludicrous.
USAGE:
“Mr. Barbecue-Smith was a short and corpulent man, with a very large head and no neck. In his earlier middle age he had been distressed by this absence of neck, but was comforted by reading in Balzac’s ‘Louis Lambert’ that the same peculiarity has marked all the world’s great men, and for a simple and obvious reason: Greatness is nothing more nor less than the harmonious functioning of the faculties of the head and heart; the shorter the neck, the more closely these two organs approach one another; argal…It was convincing.”
– Aldous Huxley, 1921.
