Monday December 11th, 2017

The exercise:

Write something that has to do with: The Peace Corps.

3 comments:

morganna said...

Bringing help and love to the poor
Do they good or
Are they white saviors?

Greg said...

@Morganna: There's a dramatic twist in the middle of that poem, which is very impressive in just three lines! Colour me impressed :)

The Peace Corps
Peace Corps, The,n.ph from O.Fr and O.Eng.. The assimilation of the French by the English, begun in 1066 when the French invaded England not realising that this would be like Ents invading a colony of woodworm, resulting in a mishmash of linguistic bludgeoning where an already debased language (English, for the hard-of-thinking) met a refined, sophisticated language and treated it like a street harlot. This dictionary documents many examples of how a delicate word with sensitive meaning was taken apart and reassembled in the mouths and minds of illiterate baboons into an insensate honking that purported to convey meaning, but here we find ourselves with the situation where English and French words were forced into a marital bed and expected to create intelligent progeny. As in many marriages (both of convenience and inconvenience) the resulting offspring was loveless and abominated.
Peace is a minor corruption of the English word Pease now commonly spelled Peas and referring to a small, green ball-bearing used to torment small children by pretending that it's food. At one point it could refer to almost any time of cooked grain, just as corn referred to any type of uncooked grain.
Corps has also lost its final e but mostly retains its meaning from the original French, that being body.
The Peace Corps therefore is the body of the peas, and refers to the interior of those small green ball-bearings in much the same was as the Eucharist refers to the body of the God of cannibalistic worshippers. It is passed around the dinner table, often in gravy boats as a convenient way of hiding its nature, and is generally regarded with either disgust or suspicion before being passed (always to the left) to the next person. The person left holding the Peace Corps when everyone else begins to eat is obliged to consume the entirety of it in one swallow, and frequently spends the rest of the day in the bathroom, regurgitating repeatedly and promising to be a better person from now on.

[Footnote: this dictionary, you should be pleased to learn, is planning on providing an online reference shortly as www.pickypedia.com/shut-up-and-learn ]

Marc said...

Morganna - I'm with Greg on this one. Well done!

Greg - this was an especially genius entry into your glorious dictionary. So, so much to love here.

Also: damn you, I actually copy/pasted that link in the hopes that it was actually true. So mean :(