Crimes Against Descriptors

As a life long chronicler of misadventures, particularly my own, I have determined that we are not using the English language to its full potential. There are perfectly useful words and phrases people have coined recently that are being completely ignored.

For example, when I was a kid there was a TV show called Dinosaurs and it taught me that “Smoo!” meant the dirty underside of your feet, in the episode it was used as a swear word. Even as a kid I thought this was perfect, but it didn’t catch on! It is mentioned on urban dictionary but not defined.
Today’s dilemma has a bit of a back story. So in the book Guliver’s travels, the horses (which are smarter and kinder than we are) call humans, represented by cavemen, Yahoos. So when I was younger that word was an insult but highly descriptive.
“I ran into this Yahoo at work today! Took a dare to break a board with his head and ended up in the hospital. ”
Or even better, “I’ve had a Yahoo-filled day.”
Then it becomes an email carrier and a perfectly good descriptor falls out of favor.
Meanwhile, days where everyone is bitchy, argumentative, destructive, etc. I call “human” days.
“There was a lot of humanity in the room!”
I no longer use it for humane but to describe the things (mostly) only humans portray. It’s a good way to recap a pissy kind of day where everyone is out of sorts.
But what do you call that moment in a conversation when you’re chatting with a regular enough seeming person and then they just show you their crazy side? I don’t mean flying their crazy flag loud and proud “Check out my rainbow socks and suspenders,” kind of crazy, I mean “pleasant weather, how’s the family, had to beat my kids with a tennis racket last night” crazy!
I just had a conversation with a coworker:
Her “Where are you working now?”
Me “I’m covering 3 departments today”
Her “Oh, you’re like horse shit”
Me …
Her “It’s something a guy I dated used to say ‘you’re everywhere like horse shit.'”
Me “Umm never heard that expression before, how old is he? it’s been 100 years since that was a relevant saying.”
Her “Well he’s dead.”
Instantly she was serious and the conversation just ended as though I had offended her. Someone just got herself off the would-be-cool-to-have-a-drink-after-work-with list!

I was trying to decided what i was going to call those moments when I realized that already has a perfect reference and descriptors. I hated the TV show Seinfeld, but somehow I caught the episode where they went to a party. To safeguard against getting stuck in annoying conversations, they had hand signals to indicate the need for rescuing. Oblivious, Jerry missed the signal and to get out of the conversation Elaine told someone maybe a Dingo ate her baby. Just imagine it from the other woman’s perspective, having a uninteresting enough conversation with someone at a party and they just start talking about dingos. The obviously crazy are so much easier to deal with than the sneaking lunatics! At least then you can avoid them completely. The Dingo types sneak attack you.

So this will be my new qualifier, “I got attacked by a Dingo today,” to represent those days when I’m lulled into a false sense of security speaking to someone and then their crazy smacks me between my eyes. Watch out for Dingos!