Four New Power Words to Use for the 2016 U.S. Elections
What? Me Flummoxed?
Employ these words like a good condiment, use a little for spice but avoid excessive amounts:
1. Sinistral
If you want to call the outgoing President a name and get away with it, here’s the noun for you. Call him a sinistral and there’s not a thing Barack Obama can do about it. He can’t deny it. He is a sinistral.
It simply means, “a left handed person”. He is the seventh sinistral to be the U.S. chief executive.
2. Flummoxed
The verb flummoxed means to be confused or bewildered.
The recent smears against Hillary seem to have left her flummoxed. She appears bewildered in her answers to questions on technology.
3. Flibbitigibbet
This noun means a flighty or silly person. It usually is applied to a woman.
I am not going to say that Sarah Palin is a flibbitigibbet, but I’ll wager that it has been said about her more than once!
4. Abjection
The noun means a low or downcast state; or a humbling or degradation.
It’s certainly a great word for politics where Abjection is the price a person pays for seeking public office. The abjection of Richard Nixon after Watergate was probably more painful than a jail term.
.............My journey to finding 'Abjection'.
I first ran across the word ‘abjection’ in Spanish (which I have been trying to teach myself for some time). I was reading a book of short Castellano tales and found an interesting one about two men who had an argument in a bar.
One man who felt 'la bajeza' (Abjection) after the quarrel paid a sunrise visit to the other's house. He scrawled 'rascal' in big graffiti letters on the door of his opponent.
When the second man saw what was written on his door he was angry and immediately went to his foe's house.
He was told, by an employee, that the man was not home and that he could write a message and leave it for him.
"No," he said, "I just came to return his visit because this morning I found his name written above my door."
Though the tale might lose something in my translation I thought it was humorous. Better than that, it gave me a new word...the 'bajeza' in Spanish; which turned out to be 'abjection' in English.
This word so applies to senior citizens. Our abjection becomes total when we start getting the dribbles of Social Security!
Good luck to all the candidates in 2016. I hope your abjection is minor. That you will not be flummoxed by charge and countercharge and I don’t care if you are a sinistral or not.
But please just don’t let any flibbitigibbets run for president.
