A glossary of winter terms

You asked for them and here they are. Okay, nobody asked for them. Here they are, anyway.

Yuletide stutter

This is an affliction suffered by store clerks as they try to utter a holiday greeting that won’t offend anybody. “Merry Chris… holid… seasons… Just take your gum and get out.”

Blade rage

This the bright, hot emotion you feel as you stand at the end of your driveway, sweat dripping into the nether regions beneath your snow pants, and watching the city plow heave another K2-sized mountain range into the area you just cleared. The inclination is to flash the driver the appropriate hand signal to express your feelings, but it just doesn’t work with mittens on.

Toro, Toro, Toro

This is the same rage you feel toward the plow driver except that this time, it’s your neighbor, the rotten bum who keeps flinging snow onto your property with his monster snow blower, which is three times larger than yours. Not that size matters. I mean, your snow blower is just fine the way it is. And anyway, it’s plenty big enough to go out there and fling that snow right back onto his property where it belongs. Unless your neighbor is bigger than you are (He probably is. You’re kind of puny), in which case you just call the cops.

Then again …

If size didn’t matter, would so many people insist on posting photos of their snowbanks on the web in an attempt to prove that nobody anywhere got more snow than they did? You know who you are.

Just being practical

This is what people think of you if you rush out and buy bottled water, candles, batteries and toilet paper in advance of a snowstorm.

A total loon

This is what people think of you if you rush out and buy bottled water, candles, batteries and toilet paper in advance of the end of the world. (Which, by the way, was Friday.)

White shame

This is what you feel when you spend an hour snow-blowing the yard and then your father-in-law comes home and does it twice as good in half the time. Either that, or you intentionally do a sloppy job so nobody will ask you to do it again. It’s hard to say, really.

Lumbar guilt

This is the feeling that arises as you watch a woman of 103 shoveling her driveway as you’re cruising by in your warm car while one of your hunting buddies plows your driveway for a 12-pack of beer.

Showing bunt

This looks like the sign your flashing while you pat your pockets – coat pockets, left pants pocket, right pants pocket and then back again – to demonstrate to the bell-ringers outside the supermarket that you don’t have any cash on you to drop into their buckets. And then those fiends have the temerity to wish you a Merry Christmas anyway.

Merry Apocalypsmas

If you can pronounce that, you haven’t had enough eggnog. Bottom’s up!

[email protected]