FLATLEAVER
Flatulance: An emergency vehicle that picks you up after you are run over by a steam roller.
What’s so funny about this? Today’s joke comes from a list of winners of The Washington Post’s annual neologism contest. Entrants have to come up with new meanings for common words. I’m not sure what year today’s word comes from, but it’s a great word. And what’s so great about it? First of all, it’s basically a fart joke, and as I’ve often pointed out, anything about body parts and functions is always good for a laugh, albeit a nervous one. As you know, fart jokes are high on any list of body function jokes. So “flatulence” is the accumulation and expulsion of gas in the alimentary canal, in other words, a fart. Notice, by the way, that there is no article to go with it. Flatulence is actually a considered a condition. If we break the word down to its recognizable components, we are left with “flat” and “lance”. We’ll just ignore the letter U. Both of these word have their own meanings, but the second one, “lance” is also the ending of the word “ambu-lance”, so it kinda sounds like it could be a suffix. In fact, it isn’t a suffix at all, because we don’t have specialized ambulances for specialized conditions and situations and even if we did, getting run over by a steam roller would never qualify as warranting its own ambulance type, even though the words themselves are a perfect fit. The reason is that it so rarely, if ever, happens in real life. In Toonville, it’s a different story. Cartoon characters are forever getting flattened into pancakes by steam rollers, printing presses, etc. We’ve all seen enough of these cartoons that whenever we see a real live steamroller, getting flattened out by one can and does occur to us, just as it did with the guy in the photo. And if you’re wondering about the meaning of the title, a “flatleaver, is New York street jargon, for someone who leaves you flat when someone or something more worthy comes along. A flatleaver is not your true friend. And THAT’s what’s so funny!
