It's innaresting....

It's morning here, and the weather is gray and strange: not one thing or another. We're between seasons....not winter or spring. There should be a word for a time like this. Maybe there once was.

Words are on my mind because I'm plugged into NPR. Susan Stamberg, or someone like her, is busily interviewing a words-expert, one who tracks the history of their usage.

While scrubbing out the cat-food bowls, I learned that girl was once used interchangeably to mean a boy or a girl child. As more words arose to mean a young female person (connoting her status as a virgin or not: maid, maiden etc.), girl eventually meant just a girl.

That's interesting, although I prefer the William Burroughs' spelling: innaresting. At his most scathing, Burroughs uses the word to mean something that's more than just interesting: it's horrific.

Any writer worth her software knows that words do more than replace monkey grunts. Besides naming things, words are depth charges constructed to sink into the psyche and then explode. Words can tweak neurons setting off massive human energies for good or for ill: check out the words of Thomas Paine or Adolph Hitler. With words alone, both set off upheavals full of wholesale slaughter and changed the fate of nations.

That's pretty innaresting too.

With this in mind, I've always listened carefully to what the White House's Current Occupant has to say. Although endless fun is made of his mutters, gaffes, and flub-ups, I think it's mistake to believe he's a dolt who doesn't mean any of it. I think he means every word, but like most heavy-weight liars he takes a circuitous route to get where he shouldn't go.

For example, his use of innaresting always means he isn't interested at all. Whenever the Current Occupant talks about his numberless critics, he prefaces his statement with , "I think it's innaresting that XYZ says...." and then procedes to call XYZ a creep in so many words. Maybe he's seized on innaresting as more socially acceptable than sez you. Personally, I think it's more closely related to the way fibbers like to preface statements with, To be perfectly frank, or To be honest. If you have an intuitive bone in your body, either phrase should make you run like the wind.

When the post-surge mounting horror and bloodshed in Iraq was brought to his disdainful attention, the Current Occupant remarked on how the Iraqi people "...were living in innaresting times..." Meaning that blood, death, chaos and destruction are merely banal and par for the course.

Innaresting, isn't it?