“The Kindness of Strangers”
“The Wimple”
“The Corvair”
“The Check; which, Bobby Simmons explains, is a mash-up of chin+neck”
“Sorrow, Pain, and Misery”
“The Oxford Comma”
“Between the A and the T”
“Gumpsticks”
“Super-cleft”*
“Rick James Face-Punch”**
“Nine Times Outta Ten”
*Which in turn led to, as these things will, language being, as Mrs. Jenkins herself had explained to her students, malleable and ever-changing, using as example the works of Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe: Why-Cleft John, Romana Cleft, Cleft Behind, and Cleft-Turn-Clyde.
**Which led, by the process exampled above, to “Fuck your cleft,” ala that one episode of “Charlie Murphy: True Hollywood Stories” on The Dave Chappelle Show where a very high Rick James arrives at the home of Charlie’s brother, the comedian and pop music star Eddie Murphy, and begins kicking Eddie’s couch with his muddy boots, whereupon Charlie and Eddie begin punching him in the legs, the take-away watercooler line (reproduced on T-shirts and other forms of cultural signifier–coozies, web banners, etc.) being: “Fuck your couch, N***er,” which the pre-leg-beating and extremely high on freebase cocaine Rick James (played by a pre-breakdown Dave Chappelle) repeats as he kicks Eddie Murphy’s couch with his muddy boots, which of course you have to wonder how fourth graders are gaining access to what is decidedly adult viewing material, before taking into account the wealth of information available on the internet, which in turn might lead to wondering how, with that much porn at their disposal, these young men, Bobby Simmons, et. al., get any homework done at all, much less spending time coming up with ungenerous names for Mrs. Jenkins’ underslung lower jaw. And but then too, I must take into account how these kids’ parents, probably, could recite verbatim the contents of Eddie Murphy’s stand-up comedy routines Delirious and/or Raw at an age not much greater than that of their present-day children, and without the aid of on-demand cable-television, much less the internet, the cassette tapes duplicated on sucking-down-D-cell-batteries-like-you-wouldn’t-believe dual-cassette boom boxes and surreptitiously distributed like clandestinely-printed pamphlets in the pre-collapse Soviet Union or, if you believe the stories, grainy VHS tapes of Rocky IV in the former Soviet States–Lithuania, Ukraine, Poland, et. al.–during the eighties.
