Category: Bad Word Pairs

“Urinal Cake”

I realize some people may not even know what this thing is, though don’t feel excluded from the party. You can see for yourself it’s still a mighty horrendous merging of words.

For the rest of you, perhaps you can enlighten me as to how a deodorizer that sits at the bottom of a urinal in a public men’s restroom got deemed as a “cake” of all things.

I’m not even going to look up the etymology of it, because the phonetics alone should have overruled whatever lore led to its inception.

“Arm Pit”

It’s bad enough our underarms (especially us brutish oafs of the male variety) have odor problems to deal with, but they also have a less-than-flattering moniker to suffer through.

An “arm” is a slightly awkward but mostly benign word. And “pit” on its own is pretty harmless (unless it’s a cherry pit, then it can be deadly).

But when you put the two together, you get a science fair project of a phrase for a body part that already has the deck stacked against it.

“Internet Meme”

I really don’t have a specific problem with our rampant Youtube culture, viral advertisements, Rick Rolls, or any sort of stupid pranks/jokes/incidents/whatever.

I do, however, hate the phrase internet meme.

As much as I liked the Chuck Norris Facts from yesteryear, I bet if somebody said, “Dude have you seen that Chuck Norris internet meme?” I would have told them to shut up and recoiled in disgust. It’s just a lame phrase. Simple as that.

And for those who haven’t heard this phrase yet, consider yourself lucky. When you finally do, I bet you’ll want to slap whoever uses it as well.

Is it possible that the term “internet meme” might itself be an internet meme? Now that would be funny.

“Chip Clip”

I am well aware of the reality of wanting to keep food fresh, especially when it comes to those goods prone to becoming stale quickly. Enter the chip clip, the cure-all for rogue chip bags left opened overnight. A chip clip has everything going for it: convenience, ingenuity, and a cute rhyming name. And who doesn’t like to go to sleep at night knowing their Fritos will be deliciously crisp and crunchy the next morning?

There’s only one problem. A chip clip is an extra piece of equipment added onto an object already designed to remedy itself with any amount of homemade logic. I personally am irked by the magnet you find on the backs of chip clips. As much as I love to brush past a chip clip on my refrigerator, send it sailing to the floor where it comes apart and you have to put it back together, you actually don’t need an apparatus to ensure freshness, trust me.

For those out there who want to keep their Fritos fresh next time, just employ the traditional single-fold maneuver. You know, the one where you take the rip-off part of the bag at the top (AKA the part where all the air goes, thus making you feel ripped-off when you finally dig into your half-full bag), fold it once against the bottom part, then lay the chips sideways on a shelf so that the fold is sandwiched between your cupboard surface and the bag itself. Works every time, I promise.

For those who don’t eat much at a time, or if you buy an uncommonly overfilled bag, you may protest how you don’t have enough slack to execute the single-fold with any success. True. However, you simply have to employ the single-fold maneuver with wedge variation. It’s the same as the traditional single-fold, only you need to butt the creased (top) part of your bag against the side-wall of your cupboard or countertop and you’re as good as gold.

“Foaming Soap”

This stuff creeps me out. I have a firm believe that lather and suds are meant to be a product of friction (caused ideally with my own hands), not a chemical reaction to air upon pumping.

But even more unsettling than the unnatural foaming is the displacement problem. When you have a puddle of soap in your palm, then clap your hands together, you get this touch-and-go sensation that the foam is going to seep out the sides and drizzle onto floor, or worse your wrist/shirt cuff.

Evil stuff, this foaming soap.

“Heavy Petting”

At some point in the history of mankind (probably when we were apes), someone decided it was a good idea to call loving caresses “petting”. Not only that, but the new-school of thinking (probably 1950’s patriarchs) thought it might be nice to put an adjective in front of the act to denote when this caress can get out of control.

And so we are left with the phrase heavy petting, which exists mostly as “something our parents would say”. And thank goodness. Maybe in twenty years our children will make fun of us for using words like “tweeting” or “browsing the web”.

“Toe Jam”

Dead skin cells, sock lint, skin oils, sweat and bacteria join forces to make one of the more repulsive by-products of the human body. It didn’t help that someone chose to call this concotion a “jam” (I’m guessing it has to do with the concept of a substance between two pieces of bread).

Similar to man boobs, toe jam can be a medical condition as well as simple poor hygiene. Athlete’s foot, for example, can trigger an excess of odor and toe jam.

Usually, though, it has more to do with dirt getting in between your toes, and having shoes with poor circulation (thus creating more sweat, and a moist environment to breed this witch’s brew of disgustingness).

**NOTE: If you have a fungal infection, by the way, PLEASE don’t go to the gym, shower barefoot, and then walk around the locker room without socks or sandals. That’s a gift that keeps on giving, and I’m speaking (unfortunately) from experience.**

“Horny Toad”

Did you know that a Horny Toad is actually a lizard, and not a toad at all? That trivia fact aside, this word pair is still somewhat silly and unfortunate for the horned lizard itself, which is actually kind of a cool animal.

I’ve always sort of pictured the horny toad to be a cassanova type of creature, like the Dean Martin of the frog world. All the toadettes swoon as he undresses them with his eyes.

Wait, what? Sorry.

“Wax Poetic”

This phrase bugs the crap out of me. I have a thing for trite, overwrought, gratuitous phraseology. And every time I hear the term “wax poetic” I picture some Ivy League wannabe listening to Eryka Badu in his bedroom while reading prose poems by Maya Angelou.

Later on he slips down to Joe’s Coffee Shop to impress his friends with a lame poem he wrote about his dead fish, something deep and abstract, open to interpretation. After this amazing display of oratorial prowess, he returns to his bedroom, turns off Eryka Badu, and flips the TV on.

He has two DVD’s he loves to watch, Good Will Hunting and Lost in Translation. Which will it be tonight? Who gives a crap.

“Man Boobs”

This pair speaks for itself. Fortunately, I do not suffer from this condition. Not yet, anyway. Apparently, in some situations the man boobs are, in fact, a disease known as gynecomastia—a glandular growth of the fatty tissues in a man’s breast. So don’t judge thy neighbor too quickly, okay? He may just be suffering from a disease.

Nonetheless, man boobs, or moobs as the cool kids like to call them, or bologna tits as Jerky Boys once coined them, earn a special place on the bad word pair list.

Also, why the hell do men even have breasts to begin with? I don’t know if I should be mad at God or Darwin, or maybe both.

“Bean Curd”

Someone on the internet asked the question: “What is bean curd?” Which I thought was a good question indeed.

The answer, wisegeek.com informs us: “To make bean curd, a cook curdles soy milk and presses the resulting soybean curds into molds to firm up.”

Mmm. Tasty. Bean curd is more commonly known simply as tofu. Those who know me, know my issues with tofu, and tofurkey, and soy milk, and rice dream, and vegetarian marketing in general. Bean curd, on the other hand, simply suffers from sounding as gross as its preparation.

Yuk.

“New Age”

Wikipedia defines New Age music as “peaceful music of various styles that is intended to help people feel good while listening.” I define it as “music your friends will make fun of you for liking, but your parents will admire you for liking.”

How do you define it? I guess the issue here is the polarizing connotation with New Age nowadays. There’s really no middle ground. You either love it or hate it. It’s kind of like World Music I guess? Though that just seems like international New Age.

Performers like Yanni get lumped in with musicians like Brian Eno, and it makes it hard to avoid contact, since I loathe one, and love the other (guess which). In any case, New Age is further proof why labels always make it harder to get underneath, to the good bits.

“Pulled Pork”

I know, I know. You’re saying to yourself: “How dare he slander such a delicious treat?” Well the deliciousness itself only heightens my disdain. While I love a couple carnitas tacos on occasion, I simply can’t shake the brutish imagery of pulled pork.

Pork as a word has always been suspect in my book to begin with, especially when you have such a heavenly term like “bacon” coming from the same animal. But pulled pork, what the heck are they pulling on?

Okay, I admit, I understand the concept of slow-roasting the meat until it’s so tender it can be pulled off the bone into delectable strands of yumminess, but could we have found another term? The Italians call it porchetta, and that sounds just about as delicious as bacon.

Mmm. Pulled pork. Mmmmmmmmm.

“Gastric Bypass”

It’s sort of like the grossest highway bypass you could imagine, only it involves shrinking the size of your stomach, then rerouting it to avoid the first part of your small intestines. Nothing is more disgusting to me than guts, and the idea of having a surgery like this is equally nauseating to imagine.

I don’t want to slander those who have undergone this procedure, nor do I deny the viability of such an operation for those who cannot bring their weight under control. But that does not blunt the impact of the images conjured in my obsessive mind when considering the notion of gastric bypass surgery.

Eew.

“Corporate Bailout”

When did the hard work of millions of Americans became the piggy bank from which poorly managed corporations drew from? I’ll never know the answer, and yet I’ve never felt so powerless as a citizen of this great country.

Ignoring the $700 billion in taxpayer dollars already approved, our government has also given the thumbs-up to an $85 billion bailout for insurance company AIG, as well as an estimated $300 billion for Citigroup. Now the auto industry is flashing Uncle Sam their puppy-dog eyes and asking for $34 billion in short-term loans and investments.

Aww, how cute, the big empirical corporations can’t make their margins, and now they need their fair-but-firm uncle to bail them out. I’m reminded of a rich kid in the Hamptons who blew all his money on mojitos for his buddies and crashed the Ferrari into a tree, then sank the yacht trying to get home, and now he needs to borrow a couple grand from mommy and daddy to pay for his girlfriend’s prom dress.

Give me a break Washington, can we let these private sector companies go bankrupt and reform on their own? No point in heaving your hope diamond onto the sinking Titanic. Let it sink, so we can remember how great it was supposed to be, and build another one even better.