Beautiful Tossed Onion
By John Vorhaus | October 22, 2015 |
Take a look at the picture accompanying this column. If you can’t read the text on the hat, here’s what it says:
I work…
I cniok…
my happiness…
I found this beautiful oddity on a recent trip to Europe, at a roadside rest stop where such head-scratching or unintentionally hilarious assaults on the English language can commonly be found on hats, jackets or shirts. Freak that I am, I kind of collect them, or anyway take pictures (though okay, I admit I did buy the hat). On this same trip, I also saw “Genuine Gear Vanguard Original Series All American Ride,” which I can kind of understand. But cniok? What the cniok is that?
I gather from context that cniok might be a verb, and I can reasonably guess that it’s somehow related to work. But how? Maybe it’s intended as a counterpoint, as in, “When not otherwise occupied by gainful employment I enjoy recreational cnioking and cniok-related activities.” Then again, it could be a reference to the higher mind, in the sense that one must first work and then cniok, or perhaps work hard or harder at cnioking, in order to attain one’s happiness. Can cniok be the road to nirvana? Your guess is as good as mine.
And that’s what has me so stoked about the English language today, specifically how it’s used in the global textile industry by those not steeped in it from birth. They create these fantastic permutations of English, and I get to guess what they mean.
Freak that I am, I find that fun.
I find that I want to play, too.
And I find that I easily can.
I merely pretend for a moment that words have no meaning for me, and then string some together, just based on sound. This yields, on first attempt, the phrase beautiful tossed onion. Now, in an exercise of reverse-engineering, I try to imagine where I might find such a phrase, or just speculate on what it might mean. Menu item in a Chinese restaurant? Descriptive phrase on a baby bib? The possibilities are endless.
See? Easy. Fun. And now it’s officially a game, a word game called Beautiful Tossed Onion, and guess what? You can play, too.
To start the game, I just give you a phrase, say, panel sharp looking tree. You guess what it means. If you guess right, or wrong, you get a point. Next, you give me one. Oh, Farewell Hotel Motel? Thank you, that’s a good one. I think it’s either the only inn in the remote village of Farewell Hotel, Arkansas, or a rock anthem about the unbearable redundant monotony of life on the road. Woot!
Hey, before we go any further, I want to make it clear that I’m in no way mocking people who don’t quite have their English dialed. My attempts to even say “cheers” in other languages are generally met with genial mockery by my foreign friends so, trust me, I’m sympathetic to the cause. In fact, people who don’t know English have kind of an edge with this because their approach is informed by an innocence that I can’t match. I could never have invented cniok, I’m sure, specifically because that cn at the start of the word looks so strange. My foundational assumptions about how English works wouldn’t let me make that choice.
Except now I can because now I’m studying it. And by studying it I mean playing with it. And by playing with it I mean watching the bedrock creativity that takes place when I manipulate language on the molecular level. This is my wheelhouse, of course (says the man who has given the world such words as sadlarious and fuckaroundarama). But there’s no reason why you can’t play, too.
Look, I’m a freak. I know I’m a freak and I’ve come to terms with it. I proudly and shamelessly make shit up. Just recently I convinced some poor bartender that Jack Daniel’s and Sprite is traditionally called a Fancy Pants. First of all, Jack and Sprite? But whatever… the point is, I made it up, on the spot, and just for fun. That’s the kind of freak I am.
But come on, that’s the kind of freak we all are. We all have a passionate relationship with language. Mine happens to express itself in making up words, deconstructing words, repurposing words, or just generally bashing words over the head with my cniok.
How does yours express itself?
What gets you off about language and how you use it? A well-turned phrase? A well-revealed truth? A satisfying plot twist? Great jokes? An honest look at the human heart? These things aren’t just your passion, they’re also your wheelhouse, keys to your style and to what makes your writing just sing.
So spend some time listening to how you sing. Identify the strengths of your game (you will find them any time your writing brings a smile to your face). Then, once you’ve identified them, lean on them. Figure out how you do what you do, then do it better.
As for places where you don’t have strength, lean into those, too. Practice things you’re not good at (as I’m presently practicing outlines and research). It’s how you get good. It’s also how you have fun.
Ah-ha! I just figured out what cniok means! It means “to extend oneself in new and different ways for the purpose of improving one’s craft.”
I work…
I cniok…
My happiness…
Indeed.
Seriously, what are you good at? What are the known (to you) strengths of your game? Don’t be shy to admit them. To name a thing is to own a thing, and how can you own your skills if you won’t even claim them out loud? (Oh, and not for nothing, but if you have any fun phrases you’d like me to try and define, I’m over here in my wheelhouse, waiting…)
[coffee]
John Vorhaus has written seven novels, including Lucy in the Sky, The California Roll, The Albuquerque Turkey and The Texas Twist, plus the Killer Poker series and (with Annie Duke) Decide to Play Great Poker. His books on writing include The Comic Toolbox, How to Write Good and Creativity Rules!
I’m afraid my wordplay is limited to turning an occasional noun into a verb (and I’m trying hard to remember one and can’t). And bad puns.
The playful impulse comes out in the wry moments – and I let it. I have a character who deals with swollen glands in her neck refer to it as ‘the dog collar effect.’ Because it holds her head at a slightly awkward angle on the days it’s bad.
Dialogue is a good place for playfulness: readers forgive you almost anything you put in dialogue, because, well, a character SAID it, so it must be ‘true.’ Report what a character has going on in his head, and the reader will sense the possibility of bias (Humbert Humbert is a prime example of that). But report words one character says another speaks – and most readers won’t question your veracity.
It gives you wiggle room.
You don’t suppose ‘cnoik’ is an anagram? I’m driving myself nuts trying to figure it out. I’ll get back to you later if I do.
My favorite menu item at a Vietnamese restaurant: “Deep fried surprised balls.”
Poem, anyone?
Open up menu.
I read: “Deep Fried Surprised Balls.”
Not tonight. Wife smiles.
Well done!
And the title on the cap?
Obviously, the time to cniok is while watching the MBL playoffs.
John-
No question, Chinese restaurants and menus are a treasure trove of fractured English. I think they do it on purpose. It’s part of the atmosphere.
At a recent workshop, editor and author Lorin Oberweger had students assemble random word combinations then justify them. The one I remember is, love is a…petite…torpedo. Immediately I thought, why yes it is!
(And not in the way you are thinking, John Vorhaus. Get your mind out of the goiter.)
Word play is a great brain game, a jumper cable for creativity. It did good things for Billy Shakespeare, for instance. (How is he, anyway? Say hi, since you’re over in Europe.)
For me the joy is more in shapely sentences and pleasing paragraphs. I also like to create white space on manuscript pages by making paragraphs end with widows, which, if you know typesetting rules, are the single words that cling by their fingertips to the bottom of paragraphs, making us visually uncomfortable.
Widows remarry when manuscript is turned into typeset pages so no one ever sees me playing this little composition game of mine, but the game does cause me to reshape my paragraphs more than I might otherwise. Which is a good thing. It’s called editing.
My point is, there are many ways to play with our playful language and to put that play in service of better writing. Cniok it up, I say. And enjoy your cup of joe.
Thanks for the Joe, Don, but I believe my mind is not in the goiter. More likely it’s in the garter.
I like to invent words that have some use–my favorite, so far, is “sprazil” and the related adjective “sprazilpated.” Sprazil, as a noun, means a non-random state whose organizational principle is not obvious. Like a room full of clutter or a project being run very much on the fly. The word works as a verb, too, “to sprazil.” A person cannot be a sprazil, but is “sprazilpated” if either interacting with or creating a sprazil. There are also two kinds of sprazil; functional sprazils, which work even though no one else is really sure how or why, and non-functional or dysfunctional sprazils, which gradually cause disaster.
You can use my words, if you like. They do help.
Why thank you, I will. Next time my wife says my office is messy, I’ll explain that it’s just sprazilpated.
For me, useless puns pop up involuntarily. Yesterday I sent a message that said “The library schedule is booked way ahead.” I followed up with “pun intended,” except I only realize these puns afterward. Once while talking with my husband by our washer and dryer, I thought, “He had a laundry list of grievances.”
My intentional word play is labeling people. In a message to my husband about our finances, I named him “Cash Guy.” Our softball playing daughter is “Slugger” and the son is “College Boy.”
Autocorrect creates the most fascinating word play, though. My phone changes misspelled words into non-words. Currentlt, my digital to-do list says I need to “slacksg.” If anyone knows what misspelled word that came from, please share!
Hey John:
Apparently Burroughs would sometimes cut a typewritten page into fourths and reassemble it to force himself into odd word scrambles and asymmetric logic. Apparently heroin doesn’t solve every problem.
It’s actually quite hard to string together random words — as any password guru will tell you. Even when we try our hardest, our unconscious mind reaches for a word it considers related even if we don’t get the connection on a conscious level.
Fun post. I’m off to prank ballistic weirdo repeat bogeyman insurance (courtesy of a random word generator).
BTW: I paid for your cup of coffee in cnioks. The exchange rate was surprisingly favorable.
Thanks for that, Dave. I didn’t realize that cniok was a convertible currency. It’ll replace Bitcoin, you betcha.
John, first things first: Jack Daniels with Sprite is an abomination.
I’ve been having fun lately with character names in a comic (though with a sober, non-Jack-Daniels-and-Sprite edge) collaborative novel: Pinky DeVroom, Unctual Natchez, Elfred Norcross, Inverness Dalton. Topsy-turving naming—though we pretend there is sense and sensibility behind it—is good fun.
Oh, and I once had a cniok that had a fine fringe of purple fur on its underside, but the standard cowboy-shaped-hat skull. Who knew?
Love those names, Tom. My current “names in search of a character” include Follens Beedalong and Namzeti Dohaneybolt.
Well, there’s always supercalifragilisticixpialidocious–which I ran around shouting when I was a kid. And all those wonderful incantations and strange beings in the children’s fantasy books. For instance, there’s the Psammead, an ancient sand fairy, in the E. Nesbit books. I think that children who are exposed to lots of weird words and word play can’t resist the fascination of further play when they grow up.
My favorite wordplay for decades was Mad Magazine’s, “It’s crackers to slip a rozzer the dropsy in snide.”
Until I found out what it means. It’s Brit for “it’s a bad idea to try to bribe a policeman with counterfeit money”.
So far as I can remember, the first word I know for sure that I invented was “flypogger,” what a frog is to a fly. This was in, like, fifth grade. Eventually I attached the word to a character name: Freddy Flypogger, the Flying Floogle of Frogs.
Fifth grade was a weird time.
I thought playing with language is just my personal freakishness. But the writers community, it doesn’t let you feel alone much.
What I like to do though, is to deconstruct words in my mind in attempt of finding it’s origin. Or sometimes, I start to focus on how words are coming out of mouth. It is really fun and surprising, the words we had took for granted for such a long time. Now that we breath and try to take them in, they are like something totally new.
“bashing words over the head with my cniok” is definitely going on my resume and author bio.
I think “cniok” is supposed to be “enjoy.”
I found a nearly identical hat with the same font used for all of the lines, and in that picture the “c” in “cniok” looks exactly like the “e” in “happiness.” The “i” in “cniok” looks different from the “i” in “happiness,” so I think it’s a squished “j.” The “k” is probably a mistake because the person who designed it isn’t very familiar with English, which is evident from the spelling of “heppiness.”
“MBL” could be an acronym for “my better life,” the Icelandic newspaper Morgenbladid, a mix-up of Major League Baseball, or total nonsense. I vote for total nonsense.