I call the girlfriend by a couple of pet names whenever we’re together, just the two of us. I usually work with “eejit”, “weirdo” or “spaz”. Yes, not the most clear examples of love and affection, but I say them sort of tenderly.
She was over earlier this evening, and told me half-jokingly that I wasn’t allowed to use them any more. I quite literally lay there and tried to think of a new word.
Suddenly it came to me: “cretin”! “I’m like fucking Shakespeare with my vocabulary,” I exclaimed.
“Shakespeare?!” said she, incredulous.
“Actually, it does kinda sound like a Shakespeare word, come to think of it”, I said.
Cue a mad rush over to the laptop, where we discovered that “cretin” actually comes from the Alpine French word “crestin”, which means a dwarfed and deformed idiot.
That. Is. Awesome. There are times when I love the internet.
Of course, I then typed “cretin” into Thesaurus.com, which gave us words like “tomfool”, “nincompoop” and “nitwit”. There was no “woman” though.
This lead to further linguistic games and talking nonsense, which resulted in the following hierarchy of fun-related activities:
Hi-Jinks
Tomfoolery
Japes
Jollity
I think the order is pretty much set in stone, but there is room between them for more precise definitions. Where would “Larks” fit, for example?
