Fun With Words

I've always been a Wordie. Words tug at me and will stick in my mind as I think of variations. This is a way of getting them out of my head into yours.

This will be a bit of silliness. Hopefully you will find my topic to be of passing interest. I’ve looking for the past year for a way to repurpose this blog, and it occurred to me that sharing my love of word meanings and usages might be just the thing. We will see how it goes.

I was sitting out on my dock this morning, feeding the fish and sipping coffee. The word “sip’ stuck in my head, and as I idly tossed fish food-yes, there is such a thing at Tractor Supply, out to the giant carp that inhabit our lake, I began to think of variants of this three-letter word that describes the acting of imbibing different amounts of a beverage or other liquid sustenance. Today we will treat the word sip to close examination and establish stage levels for moving one variant to another.

First we have “taste.” A tiny, almost infinitesimal-unless you’re sampling soup, then repeated tastes become something else, especially if you start to fill up, to check the flavor. A taste is rolled around the tongue where our taste buds tell us if it it too salty, not salty enough, sweet, savory, bitter, sour or umami. A taste often gives way to a sip. More than five and you might as well get a ladle.

The sip is a tentative, first intake of a beverage to check its suitability-whether spicy or thermal, or establish a rate of consumption. Once established the sip satisfies us and sometimes paces conversation as well as keeping our lips moistened, but does nothing to quench thirst.

From the sip we move to the swig. A swig is a healthy and significantly satisfying mouthful of a beverage that is somewhat dependent on the size of the mouth involved as to the precise quantity. Generally taken from a bottle, tipped back to sealed lips-to prevent spillage, it is a short imbibement that is associated with gusto for a known beverage. Like a beer. Beers are commonly swigged, as least early on.

From a glass, we have the slurp. The slurp is accomplished with the lips pressed to the rim of the glass, and accomplished with an inhalation that if overdone, can lead to choking and coughing, causing us-when we recover, to go back to a sip, as least to start and depending on the beverage. The intent of a slurp is the quenching of thirst or moistening food for ease of passage down the gullet. Slurping is a noisily satisfying experience that used have our mother’s looking sharply in our dad’s direction to firmly administer “guidance.” Firm guidance often took the form of a smack to the back of the head, with the admonition, “mind our manners.” Having exceeded social norms-at least around our parents table, we reverted again to the sip.

Gulping is to relieve parchment. Pure and simple. And often related to a thirst inducing activity-cutting grass on a summer day or chopping wood, or building a brick pathway in the garden. Generally taken from a big glass-think Mississippi Sweet Tea, tilted slightly to an open mouth that enables the “glugging” down of a big volume of liquid. Think of gulping as swigs on steroids in rapid succession. It is an uncouth effort to rapidly rehydrate, and often leads to a changing of shirt due to spillage. It’s noisy and satisfying, ticking two boxes on a youngster’s wish list. Rehydrating and annoying those around him. In years past, I would say gulping was exclusively a male activity, but the old guardrails have been swept asunder and you might occasionally hear or see a girl gulping down a drink. Welcome to the modern age. This leaves us with two other variations of the sip. The Chug, and the Shooter, and a sub-variant.

The Chug is enjoyed primarily by college age men and women, usually in a group setting. It involves ripping open a can of (mostly beer) and inverting it over an open mouth. The goal is to finish the can in a shorter timespan than the person next to you, or impress a girl in attendance with your chugging manliness. It can also be done with a glass, but is somehow less satisfying than by the can method. It goes without saying the unstated goal of the chugger is to become leglessly drunk in as short a timespan as possible.

Shooters are an artless way of consuming a lot of hard liquor- in a chugging sort of fashion, as rapidly as possible. A shot glass is filled with usually a flavored beverage and like the chug, tipped to the open mouth for inhalation directly down the throat. Shooters will soon enable world-class inebriation which can lead to more shooting. A variant of the shooter is the knock-back and is associated with finishing bar drinks at closing time. Or taking a pill.

Finally, we have the “Snort.” The snort is a colloquial term native to the south, and generally reserved for middle-aged to elderly men taking a bit of whiskey to savor amongst cronies while telling tall tales. There is generally no limit to snorts, but the practice may be interspersed with short naps in the sunshine. Or so I’ve heard.

This was fun. If you think I missed anything. please comment thusly. If you enjoyed it, please like and share. There will be more of these little word explorations to come from time to time as other writing responsibilities allow.

Cheers, Dave