language goodies

Fernando and I were discussing "the bees knees*" the other day, and discovered that there is a lack of consensus about why that phrase even exists. One argument is that bees carry pollen in sacks in their legs (the next thing to be outlawed by the TSA, no doubt) and so if something's really sweet, it's the bee's knees. My favorite, though, is the argument that a bee's knees must be so small, and in a world where small = good, the bee's knees are the bees knees!

However, I was discussing this online with a potential internet date, and he argued that a flea is just as small as a bee, and that he was going to start saying "the flea's knees" just to see if people noticed. He then went on to point out that a flea doesn't quite have the coolness factor of a bee, what with the honey-bees-defy-physics-by-flying thing. I cyber-swooned. (Anyone want to take bets on whether I meet this guy or not?)

*is it one bee, with multiple knees? Many bees and many knees? Tricky, this language of ours.

Later, we were discussing tertiary and quaternary, and wondered if there was anything higher than that. Turns out, there is! After quaternary, there's quinary, senary, septenary, octonary, nonary, denary. There's also duodenary (12th) and vigenary (20th), but, if you ask me, those sound like things a maiden aunt would bring up at the Thanksgiving table, much to the chagrin of the rest of the family.

And here's something else you probably haven't stopped to actually think about: lay and lie. Lots of people get them confused, but there's a really good reason why. The past tense of lay is laid. The past tense of lie? LAY. (Thanks, English.) Laying is something that gets done to an object (like laying a book on the desk, or laying a blanket on the bed) and lying is something one does to oneself (she lies down on the couch, or, if she did it earlier this evening, she LAY on the couch. Then, there's the other lie, like the way she lied to herself about how much of that chocolate she ate).

But wait! There's more!

The best new word I've learned this year turned up when I was discussing some friends the severe manscaping one of my friend's date had shown. (He was totally nut-bald!) The polar opposite of that, though, is when a woman's nether regions get quite unruly; then she's sporting a vajungle.

Class dismissed!