In beasts, the same as afterbirth in women.
In high school two friends and I one day decided to start passing notes. Until that day I can not recall ever passing notes in class or in school.
Our notes differed from what I would think of as typical notes passed between teenagers. There was no gossip, no news, no hand-crafted documentation of our lives which would today fill the screens of personal web pages.
No, our notes were Dada flourishes of randomness, possibly the stuff of the "No soap radio" school of anti-humor.
It was I who initiated the note-passing, a thicker-than-thieves gag that evolved but continued for many years.
The first note, which used an entire sheet of notebook paper, said:
Pete,
Onus.
Critically,
Mark
The note was passed in the library. Minutes later Pete responded with something I do not remember today, but it was of the format that these notes would assume among Pete, Mike, Phil, and myself: Minimal salutation, a single word for the body of the letter, a random closing word followed by the author’s name.
Pete,
Placenta.
Placidly,
Mark
"Onus" was the first word in this relay of anti-letters, and later that day I used "placenta" as the body of one of my notes.
In these and other cases I did not know what the words meant. "Onus" just sounded funny to me, and "placenta" sounded nasty, but in neither case could I have defined the words.
I was and still am guilty of grabbing words from distant synapses, choosing them for their sound while ignorant to their meaning. The beauty of this is how often I seem to find a word which, while not precisely what I had in mind nevertheless could be made to work. More memorable than those direct hits are the mis-cues.
In high school, at around the same time as the anti-notes were passed, I wrote a turgid short story under the ill-advised title "No Such Enema."
Unaware of what "enema" meant I shared the story with Chris, a friend who took one look at the title and grimaced. I must have asked him to explain his reaction, since he had obviously not read the story but nevertheless made a summary judgment on it.
We were seated in the school cafeteria, and instead of answering me directly he passed the question to his friend sitting at the other side of the table.
"Tom," Chris began, "what does ‘enema’ mean?"
Tom (and others at the table) reacted with a grimace similar to Chris’.
Tom mumbled something in an intentionally inaudible voice, covering his mouth with his hand. Chris nodded in agreement, as if entertaining the possibility that his definition of the word might be wrong.
I asked Chris to repeat what Tom had said. Chris mumbled "hose up the ass," a turn of phrase which prompted me to cross the word "enema" from the title page of my story and, after some rummaging through the vocabulary in my head I arrived at "entity" as the word whose meaning I needed.
"No Such Entity" was an awful story but my friends were kind to read it and not disapprove.
