Help me before I refer to myself again
Self-referential, adj. Referring to one’s self or itself, as in “Hell, I can write one of them self-referential blog stories, post it by 10 p.m., and spend the rest of the night drinking with Bud in the basement.”
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A couple of weeks ago, Merriam-Webster announced the 2004 Words of the Year, which is a list of the top 10 most commonly searched words at the M-W website. The number one word for 2004: Blog. Okay, so maybe you’re one of those always ahead of the curve people who have known about blogs since way back in 2003, but apparently most of America is not and did not. I have to admit that when I tell people I write a blog I am still met with some rather blank stares.
More interesting to me was the #10 word for 2004: Defenestration. Say what? Why would people suddenly start looking up this word meaning the act of throwing someone or something out of a window? Did somebody famous get thrown out of a window earlier this year so that people started seeing the word defenestrate in newspapers and magazines? Do people so despise President Bush that they started doing thesaurus searches for the most vile and disgusting ways in which to get rid of him? (“That’s it, we’ll defenestrate W!”) No, I think the interest in defenestration started right here in Peeling Wallpaper. You see, back in December of 2003, I wrote a wordplay story for the word defenestrate. Check it out for yourself. This post was wildly popular, with as many as eighty (or maybe it was eight) people coming here to read about it. Surely they told their friends, and their friends told their friends, and the next thing you know, there’s defenestration in the #10 spot.
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My good friend Mike, a regular here at Peeling Wallpaper, is also an employee in the same building where I work. He called me this afternoon to tell me that a woman he works with had seen my sleeper sofa on the side of the road. Well, not my sleeper sofa, but the one that I wrote about last week. Apparently, she brought it up without prompting, apropos of some other topic. She even commented that the sleeper was fully open as she drove by it! I have been asking around at work for days to see if anyone else had seen the sleeper sofa. Frankly, I thought I was going insane. It’s nice to finally have corroboration. (Corroboration, noun, a confirmation, as in “I got your corroboration right here, you fucking loony.”).
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After writing the poem Mirror Images, I started wondering how many other poems contain the word urinal. Certainly it would be an unusual occurrence. It’s even possible that mine is the very first poem to use the word. Wow, wouldn’t that be cool? I did a quick Google search to see what I could find out. The Google search returned this snapshot of a search someone else did at American Poems:
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American Poems Search |
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The term "urinal" has been searched for 7 times on the American Poems site since November 4th, 2004.
Search Results: 0 poets and 0 poems matched this query.
Search took 0.82608199119568 seconds. |
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Search American Poems |
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Search American Poems for a poet or poem. You can search for part of a title, or perhaps some words you remember. You can also enter the name of a poet in the search box.
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I don’t know how definitive this American Poems search is, but it turned up 0 poems using the word urinal. Maybe my poem really is the first. Strangely, though, I am not the first person to search for the use of the word urinal in poetry. At least seven people beat me to it. What a strange world.
10:03:50 PM 
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