Tumescent Camponotus Pennsylvanicus
Posted by Mike | Filed under Mike's Rambling
A significant number of my loyal readers expressed surprise and dismay at my use of the phrase “an ant with a boner” in a recent post. One went so far as to say, “I guess you aren’t really a nice guy after all.” Trust me, dear readers, I am a nice guy. I agonized for hours (well, a few minutes) over that very phrase. It is true that I generally avoid the risqué, but I felt in this case it was essential to the story.
When I first heard this ancient joke about overconfidence, I was probably playing kickball on a grammar school playground. I believe the phrase used was “an ant with a hard-on.” I doubt any of us at the time were even old enough to know what a hard-on was, but it was clearly dirty so we enjoyed it immensely. Just as clearly, it was too crude for my sophisticated blog. Whatever should I call the appendage in question? I remember Steve Martin struggling with an equally perplexing matter: What to call the female mammary organs. Melons? Headlights? Yabahoos? He finally concluded (correctly) that the proper term was “hooters.”
Sure, I could have gone with the clinical term, erection, but that didn’t seem as funny to me. “Big Johnson” seemed pretty funny, but that joke has been worn threadbare by all the T-shirts and other references (even my father used it in a lovely poem he wrote to my mother on Mother’s Day.) “Woody” probably would have worked. “Chubby” might have been too obscure. I’m not particularly fond of the equipment-related references such as “package” or “tool” or even, yes, “equipment.”
In the end, I resorted to the authoritative wisdom of one of my favorite web sites, Cracked.com. Not a day goes by without several boner references in that fine entertainment venue. If it’s good enough for Cracked, it’s good enough for me.
That said, I apologize for my shocking incivility, and promise to be more circumspect in the future.
February 8th, 2010 at 9:11 am
What about Junk?