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>SUPERVERBOSE

Words I Learned From Television

I don’t tend to watch a lot of TV, but the shows I do watch, I tend to cover pretty thoroughly. There must be something in that habit that explains why almost all my TV vocabulary comes from two shows: M*A*S*H and The Simpsons. Turns out you can learn a fair amount from M*A*S*H and The Simpsons!

  • autoclave: A device for sterilizing surgical instruments with water pressurized to high above its boiling point.
    [The autoclave at the 4077th features into several episodes, most prominently in “Operation Friendship”, in which Klinger saves Winchester from an exploding one.]
  • fustigate: Beat or cudgel.
    [When Moe maneuvers Homer into a boxing career, he’s approached by Lucius Sweet (a thinly veiled Don King character), who asks him to have Homer fight Drederick Tatum (a thinly veiled Mike Tyson character.) Moe has misgivings: “Tatum’ll fustigate him!”]
  • mountebank: A quack or charlatan.
    [The greatest vocabulary-building Simpsons episode of all time has got to be “Bart’s Friend Falls In Love”, in which the B story is that Homer orders a subliminal weight-loss tape but instead ends up with a subliminal increase-your-word-power tape. (Marge: “Homer, has the weight loss tape reduced your appetite?” Homer: “Ah, lamentably no. My gastronomic rapacity knows no satiety.”) When he discovers that he’s actually been gaining weight, he has a fit of pique: “Those disingenuous mountebanks with their subliminal chicanery! A pox on them!” Surprisingly, there were no combo scores in this episode — for some reason I happened to know all the other words they used.]
  • potable: Drinkable liquid.
    [Okay, there’s one more show that made it to this list: Jeopardy! Vocabulary is the least of what Jeopardy! has to teach, but it definitely taught me this one, due to its frequently-featured category “Potent Potables,” all about drinks.]
  • scapula: Shoulder blade.
    [Sometimes, for reasons I can’t explain, a little moment will stick in my head. So it was when Hawkeye, in the midst of surgery, asked a nurse to scratch his back, “just under the left infra-scapula.” Maybe it stuck in there because I’d never heard the word before?]
  • slugabed: Lazy person; layabout.
    [“Look at them, Smithers. Goldbrickers, layabouts, slugabeds! Little do they realize that their days of suckling at my teat are numbered!” Thus speaks Mr. Burns in “Treehouse Of Horror II.” Incidentally, I’m certain I first heard goldbrick on M*A*S*H, from Margaret or Frank in reference to Klinger.]
  • tontine: A group agreement concerning shared property, in which the final surviving member of the group inherits the property.
    [This word has the sparkling distinction of appearing in both M*A*S*H and The Simpsons. It showed up in M*A*S*H first, the episode “Old Soldiers”, wherein Col. Potter learns that he is the final surviving member of a tontine and inherits the bottle of brandy they’d all found together during WWI. On The Simpsons, it was Grandpa Simpson who was in the tontine with Mr. Burns, as they were allegedly in the same squadron in WWII. They fought over the booty, a cache of paintings from a German castle, in “The Curse Of The Flying Hellfish.”]
  • tracheotomy: A surgical procedure in which a hole is opened in the trachea to allow the patient to breathe, when the windpipe is blocked higher up.
    [This one was burned onto my brain by the outstanding episode “Mulcahy’s War”, in which Father Mulcahy performs an emergency field tracheotomy with instructions radioed from Hawkeye. We get to hear the steps of the operation in explicit detail, as he uses Radar’s Tom Mix pocketknife to make the incision, and the shell of a fountain pen as a breathing tube. It’s rather IF-like, really. Then, in a later episode (“Point Of View”), we saw the 4077th through the eyes of a soldier who’d undergone a tracheotomy and couldn’t talk.]

And finally, one of my favorite COMBO SCOREs of all time is spoken by one of my favorite Simpsons characters:

  • arglebargle or foofaraw: Argument or disturbance over nothing
    [In “Last Exit To Springfield”, in which Homer leads a power plant strike, newsman Kent Brockman asks: “Tonight, on Smartline, the power plant strike: arglebargle, or foofaraw?”]

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2 Comments

  1. jrw

    As long as you’re talking about MASH, don’t forget myocardial infarction.

  2. arglebargle also known as argybargy, which I first learned from Squeeze.

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