Drink at Work: My "Review" of Brocabulary on Lemondrop, Plus a Few Phrases that Were Edited Out

Having my writing reviewed, revised and posted by unseen editors is a new thing for me. It's not entirely bad; writers — particularly those of my ilk — require discipline and reigning-in from time to time. Still, when you think you've written something uncharacteristically biting and funny, it's sad to see it nixed.

My editors at Lemondrop recently asked me to write a post about "Brocabulary," a loose stool of a book released by an imprint of Harper Collins this week. I was told I could be as withering as I wanted to be. I was. I went a shade too far.

Below is the review in it's original form. I like it, but I see why some of it was deemed inappropriate. After that is a link to the final review as it appears on Lemondrop. I have to say, I do like how they cleaned up the end of it. Check it out over there and comment me up, folks!

When Samuel Johnson first published his Dictionary of the English Language in 1755, he could have only dreamt that it's elegant rendering of the poetics of the English language would one day be stuffed into a meatgrinder and processed into a phonetic nightmare of dick jokes and bi-curious pussy-envy.

Targeted toward the coveted 18-34 Date Rapist demographic, Daniel Maurer's Brocabulary (Collins Living) mines the fertile pun landscape for much of it's whiskey-dick sharp satire, soaking the reader in such premature rhetoriculations as dudescussion, blow jobligation and masturdate.

For all of it's desperate bravado, the book is incredibly girly. Maurer repeatedly uses straight-out-of-the-mall diminutives like expresh, sitch and sesh, words that, for this reader, undermine the whole bros before hos ethos. I dare say I have not once heard Stringer Bell inquire of one of his contempories, "You totes feelin' me?"

When all is said and done, I imagine that Brocabulary will join the pantheon of other important generational tomes such as The G.R.I.T.S. Guide to Life and Ice by Ice: The Vanilla Ice Story in His Own Words. But for now, it's the literary equivalent of a case of crabs: an embarrassing and aggravating affliction that could have been avoided by exercising even the briefest moment of clarity.

But rather than spend this entire post simply dismissing Maurer's opus, I would like to try to do something positive. To that end, I've taken a few of Maurer's choicest phrases, and re-translated them into girl speak, or, I guess, hocabulary...or English. Perhaps this will help both the bros and the hos out there, understand each other just a little bit better.

Hommitment
Brocabulary defines a hommitment as "a commitment you made with a ho that prevents you from hanging out with your bros...." Women also have a term for this situation when the roles are reversed...it's called sex. With you.

Do-venir
"A souvenir from a sex sesh." This word really helps distinguish brocabulary from standard feminine English. Just as the Inuit have thousands of words for snow, women have multiple words for dovenir: your baby, your std, your body hair to name only a few.

Landicap
"A handicap that prevents an otherwise capable player from landing women...." According to all of the women we polled (me), the universally agreed upon feminine version of this term is: a copy of the book Brocabulary.