Wow, it’s June already. What the hell, Time? What’s with the cold shoulders?
First off, as a follow up to the Sudoku Knife-fighting post, it now appears that detainees at Guantanamo Bay are being offered satellite TV and Sudoku to preserve their sanity. I say we give them all shivs and then we’ll finally have a sport worth watching.
Secondly, it has come to my attention over the years as an abuser of English, that it is sorely lacking in various aspects (e.g. facade, schadenfreude, kowtow, rodeo, you’d think English had no words of its own). But in this instance, the existence of the concatenation of certain conjugations of to be (is, are) with “not” (isn’t, aren’t), but not the first person singular conjugation thereof. And the next person to make an ain’t-aer joke will receive swift death.
In order to compensate for this linguistic oversight, I would like to introduce the concatenation “amn’t“, as that of the first person singular “am” and “not”. I would like to, but it looks dumb as all hell. To cure this terrible affliction of All-Hell-Dumb-Looking-asness, there needs to be an injection of Awesome in the form of sadly-underused but high-Scrabble-point-valued letters. Like Q.
Not only does Q get you a full 10 points in Scrabble, but it also has the best musical named after a street named after it. However, English pronunciation rules sadly neglect to specify what to do with Q lacking a following U. My solution: silent Q. Because after the business with silent Gs, Hs, and such blatant disregard for pronounceability such as crwth, I think English really doesn’t care what happens, being so distracted by how to deal with “ough” (thorough, through, tough, bought). The silent Q can be added in any number in any position, and is the bane of Spelling Bee contestants everywhere. And in this case, wonderfully appropriate for insertion into “amn’t“, creating the best contradictory contraction “amqn’t“.
I swear I amqn’t crazy.