I just finished reading Idiom Savant: Slang as it is Slung by Jeffrey Dunn. It wasn’t a very good book. Dunn fooled me by putting the best section (by far) first. There should be an expression for this, one that means: front-loading the really good stuff. It could be applied in various contexts, including romantic relationships (“watch out for her; she’s a front-loader”).
The section I liked covered the slang of nurses, doctors, and hospital staff. In a footnote on the first page, an anonymous nurse apologies, saying that the callousness of the expressions are “a defense mechanism that protects us from being overwhelmed by a sea of pain and suffering.” This hooked me: a sea of pain and suffering would likely inspire transgressive slang. I wasn’t disappointed.
Here are a few favorites:
- bury the hatchet v. to sew up a patient with a surgical instrument mistakenly left inside.
- circling the drain adj. close to death, lingering.
- cut and paste v. to surgically open a patient, find that there is no hope for treatment, and sew him up again without delay.
- gone camping adj. in an oxygen tent.
- loose change n. a nearly severed limb that will require amputation.
- waiting for the train to Chicago v. close to death, in spite of the best medical efforts. “He has his bags packed and is waiting for the train to Chicago.”
That last one raised questions. Why Chicago? Also, what city do Chicago nurses say instead of Chicago?
Later I realized that this expression could be combined with circling the drain to create the hybrid Circling Chicago. I decided that Circling Chicago would not only mean approaching death but would serve as a handy euphemism for foreplay.
You can’t imagine how happy this made me.
A note came in the mail today. I assume everyone on my block received one.
Some random facts and thoughts about it:
- My name and address were printed directly onto the envelope, as was the return address, which was simply an address, no name.
- Later I realized that the return address (which matches the address in the note itself) must be the big apartment building down the block.
- I don’t recognize the man from the photo. Have I seen him?
- K thinks the author is the man’s Carnise girlfriend, or a group of her friends.
- I suspect a scorned lover. Note the description of the man’s lips.
- The author gained access to my building and copied my name from my mailbox.
- The author believed that one is proven guilty by the accumulation of believable details, regardless of their relevance.
01 February 2005 | Broken
Below are photographs of my retinas. At K’s insistence, I paid an extra twenty dollars for them. They show the back wall of each eyeball, photographed through the pupil. The small light-colored circles are optic nerves, and the cluster of filaments emanating from the nerves are blood vessels. Evidently these photos reveal that I do not have glaucoma and that I’m willing to spend twenty bucks to indulge K.
What happened was, my glasses broke. Sadly I saw this coming. Last week I noticed a crack in the right temple, just in front of the piece that curves around the ear. The next day I visited a half dozen optical stores, hoping to get the temples replaced. Everywhere I went I was told the same thing: we don’t keep old parts for repairs. This was a lie—I could read it in the eyes of the people I spoke to, several of whom gave me a sad, shifty look which I understood to mean, “Forgive me, my job is making me do this.” In truth, no one wanted to blow a chance at a sale by admitting they keep spare parts on hand to fix glasses under warranty.
*
Without my glasses, I’m close to helpless. My left eye is worse than my right, but both are bad.
True story: At eighteen I broke my glasses but decided to go to work anyway, blindness be damned. On my way there, I walked into a metal pole. Right into it, face-first. Then at work (a Roy Rogers: “Round up that Double-R Bar, partner!”), I saw a mouse scurry past my foot.
“Ugh, a mouse!” I shouted.
It was a hamburger bun.
*
My only backup glasses are my prescription sunglasses, which I’ve always regretted having bought and have never worn. This morning I dug them up and put them on, which immediately plunged my apartment into dungeon-like darkness. I tried turning on all the lights, including the one above the stove, but this barely helped. Worse, my sunglasses felt weird on my face, which made me disoriented and cranky.
After two hours of online research and calls to optical stores, I arranged to meet K at the Lenscrafter on 32nd Street. I choose this particular store because the woman there was friendly and because this was the only place that stocked my previous prescription.
*
Everything went well at first—K helped me pick out frames, and we managed to have fun in the process—but then as I was about to pay, the saleswoman glanced at my prescription and said it would take two weeks for my new glasses to be ready. My left eye, the really bad one, had gotten worse (-10.00 in “sphere,” up from -8.75), and the new lens would have to be special-ordered.
Having anticipated this, or something like it, I dangled my broken glasses before the saleswoman and said, “I can’t wear these for two weeks: the broken end will dig into my skin. If you can’t fix them, I’ll have to buy my new glasses elsewhere.” The saleswoman looked at me, looked at my broken glasses, then looked at me again. Finally she stood, took the glasses from me, and said she would see what she could do.
This gave me a chance to explain to K what had just happened. Before K arrived, I asked the saleswoman if Lenscrafters kept spare parts, and she said they didn’t. This, I could tell, was a lie. Thus, later, when I threatened to take my business elsewhere if they didn’t fix my broken glasses, I was forcing the saleswoman to either tacitly admit her lie or forgo her commission. I figured the commission would win out and my glasses would be repaired, but either way I had nothing to lose because my threat was actually a bluff; I would buy my new glasses at Lenscrafter regardless.
K has since said I was right to lie, having likely been lied to. That’s how I felt at the time, but now I’m not so sure. Is it right to humiliate another person to get what you think is due you? K believes the saleswoman wasn’t necessarily humiliated (“this is how business works,” she said), but that, in essence, is my point. The thing called “business” perverts us.
When the saleswoman returned with my glasses, I saw that their shiny new temples were a different color from my old temples, but not so different that anyone would notice. I tried them on as the saleswoman, no less friendly than before, made sure they fit right. I’m wearing them as I type this.
