New term: “Str8jacket”

In my never-ending quest to coin a phrase (see my previous, and seemingly failed, attempt at coining the term “booger argument“), here I come again (like Whitesnake, but with less drug-induced brain damage) to introduce the term:

str8jacket: n. self-imposed constraint that prevents heterosexual men from showing emotion, feelings for anything other than sports, or affinity towards cleanliness or fashion

Case in point: the straight-man hug. Have you ever seen two heterosexual guys hug? It’s a delicious exercise in awkwardness and unintentional entertainment factor. The chests, if they touch, must be separated by the arm they keep in front of themselves; the pelvis juts out to prevent any kind of potentially sexual groin-area contact; the arm on the other guy’s back must never hold tight, but only pat the back in a pattern that, if you listen closely, seems to be Morse code for “I like poon-tang.”

Another good example is the organic impossibility of straight men of admitting they find other guys attractive because if they did I can only assume they think they’d automatically become rabid pillow-biters and would have to like flavored coffees and listen to Erasure. How is it that gay men can objectively find beauty in women, having grown up, after all, in the same society and having the same “ideals” of beauty reinforced throughout their lives, while straight men are unable to?

At least now there is this concept of “metrosexuality” (whose origin and etymology I find somewhat mysterious), which is some modern men’s outlet for expressing their appreciation for cleanliness, fashion and grooming without having people assume that they watch baseball just for the tight uniforms. Metrosexual men have truly broken free of their str8jackets (more likely than not to further confuse most gay men’s gaydar)!

Anyhoo, if any of you can think of other examples of men confined to their str8jackets, please post them! 😀

PS. I spelled it “str8jacket” instead of “straightjacket” because:

(a) It’s shorter and I’m lazy, damnit
(b) It can be considered “l337” and thus, immediately cooler to geeks, and I’m a geek, damnit
(c) I felt like it, and it’s my blog, damnit

New term: “The Booger Argument”

I’ve always wanted to coin a turn of phrase. I envy the guys who made up the site for “jump the shark” and turned the phrase into a well-known reference being used by people who probably have no idea of its inception.

To wit, I offer up a phrase I invented, which I shall then proceed to explain and give its origin.

Presenting:

booger argument: n. something said during the course of a discussion which is so ridiculous that it is evident it is pointless to continue arguing with that person

I shall now give the etymology of this phrase:

I had caught my sister picking her nose and then happily proceed to bite the nail of the same finger she picked her nose with: I called her on it, and told her that was gross. My sister is loathe to concede defeat, so obviously she started arguing with me, asking me what was the big deal. I pointed out the rather obvious fact that boogers are dirty, and thus she could get sick. She then proceeded to shock me with what will henceforth be known as the booger argument: she said that even though I didn’t eat my boogers when I was little and she did, I got a lot more strep throats in my youth and she didn’t, so maybe eating boogers boosted her immune system and that’s why she didn’t get sick so often.

Yes: in order to win an argument, my Cornell-graduate, law-student sister actually advocated the eating of boogers. At that point I just held up my hands and said: “You know what? I can’t argue with someone who has said something like that. So you win.”

That, my friends, is a booger argument.

Please feel free to look for other “booger arguments” in your daily life, and if you find any, please post a reply to this post and share the wealth! 🙂