NTMP 121: Undulous Bastards
Also: a brief NTMP hiatus
New-To-Me Phrases, August 25, 2024
Giant, sparkly clams * An army of bastards * Berry budget * Feeding two birds with one scone * Fluffy Coke * Tamori! * Post-It-ing
The Phrases, With Context
It seems that one of the wild turkeys in our neighborhood has adopted my family. He’s not super-aggro like the one that chased me across my yard, but that’s probably because it’s not mating season. This dummy still likes to chase cars on occasion but he’s pretty mellow as toms go. Here he is in our driveway getting ready to chase my husband’s Jeep in a moment straight out of Jurassic Park:
My husband theorized that he was sleeping on our property somewhere and sure enough, we heard him on the roof one night and spotted him flying into one of the very tall locust trees out front:
We’ve been debating names for him and my middle kid’s idea of “Turkey” seems to be winning, damn her. My youngest is pushing for Klaus, but I feel like he needs a himbo name, like a benign gym bro who’s not very bright. Or a Muppet name like Gonzo or Grover.
What are your thoughts on what we should call him?
And that’s your small town wild turkey update you didn’t ask for!
This week we have truckloads of raspberries, gentler idioms, sticky sodas, and more. Let’s get to it!
But first, a poll
Turns out I added an August post to July’s poll. Oops. We still have enough phrases to do this right, however. Time to vote:
1. Giant, sparkly clams
Okay, there are SO many potential jokes to make here. I will say that deploying a phrase like “undulous innards”—itself a great word pairing—in a piece about clams is a bold choice and I approve. This phrase comes from an otherwise serious Scientific American article about how a species of clam with iridescent flesh is inspiring a scientific breakthrough for building more efficient solar panels.
I had a high school biology teacher who said that pretty much any human invention has an analog in nature, which is fun to contemplate to this day. Airplanes? Birds. Bombs? Meteors and volcanoes. Houses? Caves. Flashlights? THE SUN. I could go on but you get the idea.
2. An army of bastards
Even though season two ended a couple of weeks ago, I’m still thinking and writing about my special interest of the summer (besides the turkey), House of the Dragon. This phrase has made the rounds among TV writers and podcast hosts, who joked about how it would make a great metal band name.
Here’s the context (light spoilers ahoy so skip if you haven’t watched yet): In the world where this story takes place, status and title are everything so being a child out of wedlock truly sucks and “bastard” is both a pejorative and an everyday word indicating social status. When queen Rhaenyra Targaryen strategizes about forming a literal army of literal bastards, that phrase landed as both hilarious and awesome.
3. Berry budget
Berry budget refers to the money parents need to set aside so their kids can eat their body weight in berries. I knew this was a thing but had never heard this phrase for it. If you’ve ever parented or hosted a tween or teen, you know that they can inhale a Costco-sized pallet of berries in minutes like a bunch of bony meatbag locusts. I’m talking: set them out on the counter, turn around to do something, and when you turn back everybody’s gone and there’s like one dried-up berry left spinning on the counter.
I first spotted this phrase in the NYT piece cited last week, “What Your Grocery Cart Says About You.” I did a bit of digging and couldn’t find a first reference, but it goes back at least two years from some random parenting message board.
4. Feeding two birds with one scone
This is a gentler alternative to the brutal “killing two birds with one stone.” While I don’t know that I’d adopt it, I do appreciate that it exists because I hate the banal cruelty of the original—it’s right up there with “there’s more than one way to skin a cat” that just . . . doesn’t need to exist? We have so many combinations of words—I have a backlog of more than 120 posts about this very thing—and therefore I don’t see why we need to hang on to idioms involving animal cruelty.
Thanks to my pal Jade Eby for this one! Jade shares brilliant ideas for fiction writers in unique ways at The Rebel MFA Way.
5. Fluffy Coke
No, this isn’t a joke about a lawyer’s lunch break. According to this Chowhound post, a fluffy Coke is a TikTok fad where you line a cup with marshmallow fluff, add pellet ice and then pour Coke over it.
I’m not that into sugary drinks but would try this once just out of curiosity. I also love the punny and evocative nature of this phrase.
6. Tamori!
It was fun reading about people’s reactions to seeing Japan’s biggest TV celebrity in expat Craig Mod’s post. 78-year-old Tamori (a stage name that’s an anagram of his surname) is a bit like Japan’s Johnny Carson, though hopefully not as much of an asshole as Carson was.
I’m just really a sucker for enthusiasm. This is a long-ish read but it’s a fascinating bit of Japanese pop culture immersion that I, an uncultured rube, knew nothing about.
OMG TAMORI!!! TAMORI!!! People were screaming from their cars, from buses. Construction workers hanging off buildings were yelling down to him. . . . it was as if the hundreds of people shopping for vegetables and noodles were witnessing Moses part the Red Sea. Tamori!!!! — women in their 60s and 70 and 80s screamed and hopped and pointed and shed tears. I’ve never been so close to celebrity that’s so on the receiving end of this much reverent love and admiration. Laser beams of adoration were flying out the eyeballs of everyone, piercing Tamori’s chest. I was getting a contact high just rubbing shoulders as we walked the market.
7. Post-it-ing
This phrase comes from my friend and essay writing mentor, Amy Paturel - whose Substack Writing What Moves You is a must-read for anyone interested in narrative nonfiction.
Amy emailed me to write:
My friend just said “happy post-it-ing” to me when we were discussing HOW to wrap our minds around a book project. Post-its are brilliant!
Yes, they are! I like to use Post-its or notecards either when initially mapping out a complex writing project or later in a project when I need to move furniture around and get a bird’s-eye view of its components. I have literally printed out an essay-in-progress and cut it up to reconfigure it.
This week, Austin Kleon wrote about artists who use school supplies to create their work and linked to a post about Phyllis Diller’s massive “gag file” filled with jokes typewritten on notecards and how film editor Brian White uses notecards to keep track of scenes in a film.
There’s no doubt that digital creation is valuable - I used Apple’s Freeform digital post-its for an op-ed I wrote for a client this month. But there’s something both useful and satisfying to use tactile objects like Post-its or notecards to get a broader sense of a project in progress.
If you’re into stuff like this, I have a book recommendation for you: The Work of Art by Adam Moss. It’s a massive, gorgeously rendered tome that you can read in chunks, say every day at lunch like I do. If you make things or are interested in artistic processes, you will get so much out of this book. It’s something you’ll want to own and keep out in view because it’s so beautiful and revisit over time.
NTMP Admin Note
NTMP will be on hiatus for a week or two while I recover from orthopedic surgery—all part of my plan to gradually replace every body part with metal. I have big plans to suffer during PT and rewatch Umbrella Academy. If you’re really feeling the need for new phrases, I have an extensive archive and an ever-growing directory where you can search by topic for your reading enjoyment.
That’s it for this week! See you on the flip side, and remember to keep making it weird and stay furiously curious.
CALL THE TURKEY JERRY NELSON
Good luck with the surgery-and the Turkey. For obvious reasons, I second the name “Jerry Nelson”.