The Flub

2021-02-21 #diceRollProse

Stats

Words: 124
Words-of-the-day: 26
Inclusion: 21%
Sentences with no words-of-the-day: 0
Most words-of-the-day in one sentence: 8

Nouns: 10
Adjectives: 14
Verbs:1
Adverbs: 1

Words of the week

Pharaonic (adj): impressively or overwhelmingly large, luxurious.
Fair-minded (adj): characterized by fair judgement; impartial; unprejudiced.
Demure (adj): characterized by shyness and modesty; reserved.
Anodyne (adj): soothing to the mind or feelings.
durable (adj): able to resist wear, decay.
meta-analysis (n): In statistics: analysis of data from a number of independent studies of the same subject to determine overall trends and significance.
sensational (adj): extraordinarily good; conspicuously excellent; phenomenal.
Slogan (n): a distinctive cry, phrase, or motto of any party, group, manufacturer, or person; catchword or catch phrase.
Grandiose (adj): affectedly grand or important; pompous.
Proclamations (n): a public and official announcement.
Perdure (v): to continue or last permanently; endure.
Golden-ager (n): an elderly person, especially one who has retired.
In stitches (n): laughing very hard.
Prescience (n): knowledge of things before they exist or happen; foreknowledge; foresight.
Toady (n): an obsequious flatterer; sycophant.
Fidgety (adj): nervously and excessively fussy.
Rueful (adj): causing sorrow or pity; pitiable; deplorable.
Perpetrate (v): to present, execute, or do in a poor or tasteless manner.
Underwhelm(v): to fail to interest or astonish.
Satyrisation (n): The situation where interspecific mating fails to produce hybrids and thus reduces the fitness of the species involved.
Involution (n): the act of involving or complicating or the state of being involved or complicated.
Embarras de choix (n): an excess or abundance of options from which to make a selection.
Indissoluble (adj): not dissoluble; incapable of being dissolved, decomposed, undone, or destroyed.
Plethorically (adv): of, relating to, or characterized by plethora.
Unavailing (adj): ineffectual; futile.
Soup kitchen (n): a place that gives food to poor people.

Breakdown

I was laughing my head off writing this one and I hope you had a giggle getting your head around these words too. I loved writing this piece, not only is it pure comedy but it’s jam packed with words-of-the-day. Sentence two has six, and sentence five has a whopping eight words-of-the-day. The stats for The Flub is probably going to be a benchmark for a long while.

The first two sentences deal with the protagonist’s deep vexation towards wasted efforts gone into the preparation of something. You, the reader, don’t know quite what it is yet, but you have learnt the protagonist has had to contend with peers they feel particularly cynical about, and he is probably a part of some well organised and sinister cult or university, perhaps. The resentful use of fair-minded, demure and anodyne adjectives should make you understand how loathsomely the protagonist views his peers. Pharaonic – or pharao Nic as I like to say – is a cool modifier for ‘creations’; it makes me think of Chinese dragons for some reason. That together with the way the protagonist rants on about grandiose and sensational preparations, and the repetition of ‘wasted’, gives the feeling he was quite desperate to make a dramatic impact.

By the end of the first paragraph you should have a feeling of just how flustered the protagonist is, knowing they were about to be made a laughing stock for creating a mutt. But what is the mutt? Do read on loyal reader. I’m never too confident with my placing of ellipses but ‘… mutt’, in this case, really sells the protagonists disgust.

In the second paragraph, the protagonist reveals the source of their frustration. He starts with a question, ‘why?’ The shift in attitude still maintains disgust as you are introduced to the unfortunate assistant, but you also should feel the protagonist’s self-berating with the question, ‘why had I not the prescience’. He then holds nothing back in his contempt for both his assistant and ‘The Flub’. You can pick up on how the tone changes from a scientific, educated string of thoughts with: prescience, satyrisation, involution, embarras de choix, indissoluble, plethorically and unavailing; and is pulled down into something more base and hateful when he talks about his assistant: toady, fidgety, rueful.

The closing sentence really drives home how utterly furious and outraged the protagonist is even stooping to insult the homeless in his seething rage.

I do love this piece, but there is still room for improvement. It’s adjective heavy with two word-of-the-day verbs transformed into adjectives. I also double up adjectives in a noun phrases which might not be best practise (demure anodyne sentiments). I committed some verbicide as well on toady. This is a noun or a verb. But it feels like an adjective to me so, I’m the boss, right? Adjective it is now, and forever will be. The verbs I did use are quite basic and I repeated ‘see’ which should be better. And there is one grammar mistake which is quite glaring to me now. Can you spot it? I use a semicolon and follow it with a capital letter. Bad author, bad!