Balderdash is the outdoor game where all the great-uncles have a relay race.
I immediately thought of the ancient TV show (UK; apparently based on a US original) Call My Bluff. Here’s a taster - the video quality is pretty awful, BUT the edition I happened upon features the recently deceased Tim Brooke-Taylor and the wonderful and much missed Victoria Wood, both looking alarmingly young. So I’m sticking with this video for sentimental reasons.
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Must have been gazpacho (my Mexican friend, who is also my accomplice in banditry)
Viva Gazpacho!
And I’m not trying to bring up Trump’s statement, but:
Testing positive for a disease should meant you don’t have it. “I tested positive for cancer. That’s a very positive thing.”
Testing negative should be the other one because it is bad.
You can patronize a restaurant, but don’t patronize the servers.
“Palimpsest” was the name of a literary magazine featuring Iowa-only authors that was published for many years.
One of James Michener’s books, that was set in the present day (IIRC it was “Space”) featured a phony TV preacher named Leopold Strabismus; he chose that surname because few people would know what that really meant.
There was a girl with this condition in my high school class. It always seemed that she was looking just to the side of you.
If another Briton might weigh in –
There’s a British thing – I gather, initially a brainchild of Tim Brooke-Taylor among others – called the “Uxbridge English Dictionary”: featuring a huge number of “what words ought to mean…” ; including the use of many British place-names, Uxbridge being one. I’m hopeless at doing links: so need to take the tack of “Google Uxbridge English Dictionary; the first ‘hit’ should be the online edition of same, ‘ready to go’ in all its glory.”
(I’m often a miserable so-and-so; this subset of humour does little for me – but “for them as likes…”)
A very similar thing was done by the British humorist J.B. Morton (pseudonym “Beachcomber”). fl. 1925 - 75 – shall we figure that he and Michener thought of it independently? “Beachcomber” turned out great quantities of, to my taste, wonderfully crazy and off-the-wall stuff: created many weird characters, including Dr. Strabismus of Utrecht – the ultimate mad scientist and inventor of useless / non-functioning devices.
“Sued” and “Impeached” should mean you successfully did the thing. And NOT tried to do the thing.
There was (verum dico) some annoying activist on Lesbos who insisted only genuine residents could be Lesbians, not foreign “sexual deviants”— lost a court case and everything.
I always thought plumbago definitely sounds like an occupational illness that a plumber would get from having to bend down so much when fixing pipes.
A pergola is clearly a leafy plant.
I believe I first encountered “palimpsest” as the title of Gore Vidal’s memoir. It’s defined on the first page, so I spent very little time wondering what it means.
I dunno, the last time I tested positive for a disease, I was very happy about it. All of the other possible explanations for the symptoms I was having would have been much, much worse. And knowing for sure meant it was possible to move forward with treatment.
“Impeached” should mean “punished with a pelting of peaches.”
The word “plebiscite” should refer to something medical, most likely some component of your blood.
It certainly shouldn’t have anything to do with voting.
“Melanoma” sounds like the name of a a beautiful island in the Caribbean that’s a lovely vacation destination.
“Glad you had a nice tropical vacation; by the way, do you have any idea where you got that melanoma?”
“Melanoma.”
I took my car in to get attired. A few years later I got it retired.