Some new useless words for your lexicon (at tremendous savings)

By Ed Goldman

As we all know, “woke” is the grammatically grotesque term used to define whether a person is politically correct, progressive, gender-sensitive, culturally appropriate and phenomenally tedious to spend time with. 

I think I’d prefer sharing a meal with a whole-life insurance sales rep, budding arsonist, cosmetic anesthesiologist or car-wash lifeguard than with someone who declares he/she/they/them-‘uns is/are/is-a-fixin-t’-be “woke.”

Today I reveal some other, lesser known but equally obnoxious political labels you may want to consider applying to those/them/he/she/it who/that/which fits the category:         

FOLK. Barack Obama knew how to do “folk” better than any elected official. It mandates practitioners to drop the “g” from almost any gerund—such as coming, going, waffling, disappointing—so they sound more like what they presume “regular people” sound like. Many men go all “folk” when they try to explain why they’ve visited a car mechanic or hired a contractor, in the somewhat deluded sense that because the workers are “blue-collar” they must also be functionally illiterate. 

Yet, as I’ve taken pains to point out in this column, I’ve interviewed at least five young-ish college graduates who still uttered a variant of “Him and her sure seem to get along.” I’d like to report that my response was neither “Them do?” nor “They does?” Well, that’s what I’d like to report, anyway.

YOKE and YOLK. In this new lexicon (which we’re making up as we go along), to be “yoke” means to be in a relationship either with another human or, natch, a team of oxen. To be “yolk” in the other hand implies the person is what used to be called a “good egg,” which usually referred to the nerd left to walk home from a rave because the eight-seater SUV already had five people in it, three of whom opted to sprawl across two seats each.

POKE. This word has had so many meanings over the years that it’s tough to assign it a new definition. It’s an alternate word for prison (sometimes with a “y” added to make doing hard time sound like adorable activity), a fist punch and—as Robert Duvall used it to suavely seduce the call prostitute played by Diane Lane in “Lonesome Dove”—as an Old West way of asking a girl to dinner and a movie before movies were invented and dinner consisted of chuckwagon leftovers. 

I’d like to propose a new use for it. If someone calls you “poke” they may actually be saying “Polk” and consider you what was presidential timber, circa 1845, the year Joe Biden was Baptized.

SOAK. The exciting new term for a person who, spongelike, completely sucks the energy from a room by turning the conversation to whole-life insurance, arson, cosmetic anesthesiology or the demands of being a car-wash lifeguard. See paragraph 2.

BLOKE. This is what you are if, upon returning from a vacation in Liverpool, England, you affect what you think is a Cockney/early Beatles accent but act surprised when your friends (an admittedly diminishing group) alternately ask a variant of “What’s the deal with the Scottish brogue?”—or worse, “Are you doing Yosemite Sam? Hey, not bad.” The sad thing is that they know bloody well (!) you’re trying to sound like a Brit because you’ve told each of them, repeatedly, about your bloody vacation (!!).