Words from Table Talk's "Five Words" Contest

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At times Vladimir took a certain Schadenfreude in Estragon's increasingly severe lethonomia, but things got rancorous when he found himself being awakened repeatedly out of his very pleasant state of hypnerotomachia just because E. had forgotten the word Zugzwang yet again.

Accuse me of omphaloskepsis, and I must perforce admit "Peccavi!" - navelgazing is as much my defining vice as the kenspeckle stripe of the skunk - and yet, is there not as much truth to be found in introspection as in following the zetetic mode of the true seeker, or the aleatory caprices of the quincunx?

As he stood before the table, groaning under its weight of delicacies, a veritable panoply of excess, Psmith found himself stammering embarrassingly, as he tried to explain the presence of the ermine in the dumbwaiter, perhaps through some kind of Freudian association between the word "ermine" and the word "muff".

Sam had already profited handsomely from the public's esurient craving for fresh Tickle-Me-Elmo paraphernalia, when he figured out a clever way of making "Elmo sampans" by deft evagination of old sporrans, and his market research team was already investigating potential demand for a series of "Elmo's Everest adventures" manufactured, using the best faux-samizdat techniques, to look like actual sherpa journals.

Sionnach, these are all extraordinary.

Arthur's life as an actuary was an ordered one - his work dealt with the empirical, the rational, and when work was done, there was nothing that pleased him more than to spend the evenings sequestered away from his fellow man, preparing his favorite delicacy of shark's fin soup, a state of affairs that changed considerably after his expert testimony at the trial of Paulina the punk pole dancer, who was suing her former employers for negligence, following a painful mishap involving a disco ball, a bottle of Kristall vodka and the bachelor party of his own nephew Arnold, about whose behavior the less said the better.

Ireland is associated with harps and bogs, New Zealand with the kiwi, and Australia is inextricably linked in my mind with convicts and that porcine battleaxe with the wonderful bel canto voice, Dame Joan Sutherland.

disclaimer: I don't really think Joan Sutherland is a porcine battleaxe - but am claiming poetic license as my excuse.

As the majestic initial chordal progression of Debussy's Submerged Cathedral filled the concert hall, evoking the faint sacerdotal chant of some ancient lacustrine brotherhood, Leopold looked at his wife's hugely tumescent belly, winced at the wave of pain that washed over his body in sympathetic contraction, and prayed that their health insurance was adequate to cover his-'n-her epidurals in cases of severe couvade.

The one starting with "Given the atrocities" is a beautiful use of language.

Ever since the accident with the machete, his decaudate companion had been restive, and prone to malarkey such as snatching Pierre's treasured oenological guide to the region, upon which he liked to chew, while remaining tantalizingly out of reach, prompting the Belgian to reflect that this was the absolute last trip he was going to take with a prepubescent monkey in tow, with or without an intact tail.

Fatima was without doubt a paragon of pulchritude, but as she typed the incendiary message into her blackberry, while simultaneously using her glue-stick to tape a poison-pen note to her rival's locker, she proved once again that she was the unrivalled queen of mean at Tigris and Euphrates Junior High.

Occasionally, two sets of challenge words back up, so that the requirement is to construct a sentence which uses 10 specified words, rather than just 5. Avoiding clunkiness in this situation is well-nigh impossible. For example:

Zoroaster contumely pettifogging tampon peripatetic faun caste domino starvation lamp


"Life as a supermodel was rough", thought Naomi, " to maintain membership in the caste required several hours a week under the tanning lamp, a near-starvation diet and peripatetic travel schedule sufficient to render tampons unnecessary, the need to maintain the grace of a faun, to satisfy the pettifogging requirements of diva designers and prickly photographers, or risk the vicious contumely of the fashblogistas, (one of whom had referred to her only last week as a 'disciple of Zoroaster, in the original sense, meaning 'owner of feeble camels'"),
and, recalling the humiliation, she reached over for another slice of Domino's.

The gazebo, an exact replica of the Cinili Kiosk at the Topkapi, provided excellent protection against the steady defilade of the opposing team, so Reginald felt confident that he could lead his team to victory in the day's wargames, that is, until he made the connection between the gritty feeling in his shorts, the increasing burning sensation in his perineum, and the supercilious smirk on the face of Basil Ponsonby-Smith, the opposing team captain, who Reginald had found earlier in the day doing something furtive with a peppermill in the laundry room, at which point he let loose an involuntary howl of panic - "Nooooooooooo! Say iTAIN'T soooooooo!"

It was Dick Dennison's doctoral dissertation : "The Damsel with the Dulcimer : Dreamscape or Dystopia?", as well as his dabblings in dendrochronology that had driven the devilish dominatrix Dora to disrupt his daily drive, diverting him down the dark, dizzying decline to her dungeon where, deliquescent with desire, douched, and decked out in her diaphanous dolman, Dora decocted another daiquiri and decided how she would deal with disobedient doctor Dick.

Given the atrocities that Mildred had perpetrated on the language during her first six months as president of the Ladies' skeet-shooting and mole-whacking club, the sentiment that her come-uppance was overdue flickered, smoldered, then erupted at the by-now-infamous June meeting wherein the other members voted unanimously to impeach her, then proceeded to pillory her mercilessly, with a ferocity the memory of which still causes some of the meeker members to blush with residual shame.

As Sir Hosis took another swig of eau-de-vie, his pet kinkajou perched on his shoulder like a harbinger of doom, the xiphoid scar on his cheek throbbing as a reminder of previous battles, he cackled evilly: "Now that my brother is safely stashed in the oubliette, no need to wait for a quorum" and signed the order that consigned the prisoners to a painful death.

As she shimmered down the red carpet like a mirage, bedecked and bedizened with bling, all eyes locked upon those fabled breasts, the effect was spoiled only by the wardrobe malfunction during which her right nipple escaped the confines of her Secret Embrace strapless demibra and popped out in search of air, like a prairie dog on patrol in the grand canyon, granting the assembled paparazzi, and estimated 500 million viewers at home, their first, and most memorable, nipslip of the evening.