Zeitgeist - it’s an excellent, useful word. Now though, after seeing that stupid conspiracy video spread almost as much as that abomination Loose Change I can’t see the word without thinking of it. Shame too.
There’s probably more for me, but I’ve been up for about 18 hours so I can no longer brain, for I have caught the sleep-deprivation induced dumb.
Any words that you can no longer see/use without some weird association going on, funny, tragic or otherwise?
I can’t think of the word “quickening” without thinking of the movie Highlander. If you’ve never seen it, the quickening in the Highlander is the part where one immortal guy kills another immortal guy and the killer gets all the energy and power of the guy he killed. Usually this involves raising a sword to the sky and screaming. Unfortunately, early fetal movement is also called quickening, so every time I feel a little bump or stretch inside me, I imagine a mini Highlander bellowing with a raised sword. It’s very, very weird.
Phenomenon.
(Doo doo, doo doo doo.)
overlyverbose -that’s funny.
I have a friend who has a very nice wisteria in his front yard. Every time I see it I hear it in the voice of the Def Leppard singer.
I get wisteria when you’re near.
Teabag.
What Ludovic said. Ditto for anything associated with the Boston Tea Party- my mental image is now of Indians howling and tossing crates off a wooden ship superimposed over the Pecker visual of a bunch of nearly naked guys dancing to Erasure.
Cite
Quagmire.
gigitty
Burma (from a Monty Python sketch, gets good around 2:19).
Really sucks too because of the tragedies in Burma, and I can’t think about them without laughing. Sorry!
Cromulent.
But this word embiggens any sentence it appears in!
When I was around five, I had a terrible nightmare that my mother died by eating a chocolate chip granola bar that one of her friends had laced with poison. In my dream the police investigator said to my father, “Apparently, someone poisoned her granola bar.” I woke up shrieking, and of course my parents came running. Once I was calmed enough to speak the first thing I said was, “What does apparently mean?”
It’s such a common word that I don’t have that memory EVERY time I hear “apparently,” but for many years after the dream, I hated hearing the word. Absolutely hated it.
I was a very sensitive child.
Ibuprofen (I had to use the Dictionary to correct it) I knew someone who called it Ipubrofen and it ruined it for me.
Likewise, Effident is how my son used to say Elephant, so I can’t see or hear it without a little heartsquish.
Napkin. Sure, like anybody else I like a napkin to be sanitary before I use it. Too many television ads have ruined the word for me. I just use paper towels to wipe my mouth with these days.
Great. Now I have the flippin’ Muppets in my head!!
:smack:
For me, the words that are forever ruined:
“I do”
Fickle. My heart always jumps just a wee bit when I see that word.
I was probably twelve when I was babysitting. The kids were in bed, and I was hanging out bored as ever. The parents had a book called Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Sex. I felt kind of dirty reading it, like I was reading hardcore porn, but it was fascinating and I couldn’t put it down. I figured that the parents would come home at some certain hour, and I had plenty of time to destroy the evidence by putting the book back on the shelf.
So I was reading about how women could have birth control by getting their tubes tied, but women are sometimes fickle, and… Fickle? That’s a funny word! Anyway, women are sometimes fickle, and…
Car lights in the driveway? Oh shit! They’re home! They’ll be through the door before I can put the book back! What to do, what to do. I stood there, red as an apple, hiding The Dirtiest Book in the World behind my back, wondering how I was going to make my great escape. The master plan I came up with was… Nothing! I was screwed!
I got a slight temporary reprieve from my execution, as when they walked in, they didn’t even notice me. They looked a wee bit tipsy. Fickle, fickle, fickle, what was I going to do? Finally I came up with something brilliant. I’d drop it behind a piece of furniture. HA! They’ll never find it there!
I carried out my brilliant plan, got paid, then went home. Then it struck me – Yeah, they’ll find it alright. Shit!
I didn’t sleep a wink all night. I felt so guilty. And that damn word kept running through my mind. I had no idea what it meant, but I knew it was dirty!
Abort, in the sense of ending something.
With all the drama with abortion rights, I cannot not giggle when I see that word.
Devastating.
Years ago, my family was listening to a political speech (I believe it was during the leadership convention for the provincial NDP party). In a passage about recent troubles for farmers, the phrase “devastating frost” was mispronounced as “devasitating frost” ( duh - vas - uh - tate - ing ). This has become a running joke in my family. We can be watching a big hit in a football game, and someone will comment that the guy got devasitated. For some reason that extra syllable makes it hilarious, and I can’t actually pronounce the word properly anymore without thinking about it first.
There should have been only one Highlander…
I can’t read the word grotesque without remembering a boyhood friend saying, “grots-cue.”