Bored Wars

I get sooooo tired of watching various message boards falling all over themselves trying to outdo other boards. They seem sometimes almost like ignoble little duchies, virtual feudal principalities with firmly entrenched monarchies. They can be fiercely territorial, even war-like, fraught with power plays and raging egos armed to the teeth with sharpened tongues and fortified keyboards. Their battle cries almost seem to be, "Only we have the truth!" "Listen to us and nobody else!" "It's our way or no way!" "We are the way, the truth, and the salvation!" Puh-leeze. Are they running message boards or ... cults? Sometimes, it's hard to tell. Reading them all is something to do when you're bored, I guess, but it gets hard to read the same old redundancies day after day. Some of these boards grow exponentially every day simply by (presumably) word of mouth. Others will do everything but stand on their heads naked trying to attract attention.

I run a message board. Growth is good and always welcome, but it's not the be-all and end-all. It's great when new members join, especially when they have a lot of wit and wisdom to contribute. I don't sink into a decline and get the vapors over lack of trackable growth, though. I'm sure some people find us boring (truth is, we bore ourselves sometimes) but as long as the membership is happy and keeping a lively dialogue going, everything's copacetic. I don't trawl the Web desperately trying to generate interest and rope in new members. I don't join every board in the known universe for the sole purpose of looking for new converts -- and a fresh place to plug my goods. I don't brag and crow and make insupportable claims. I'm not in the salvation business, either.

I have members who found the board in the usual ways people find message boards that appeal to them. They joined because they ... wanted to. They post what and when they feel like it, whether it's to announce some good news, comment on a topic of interest, note with raised brows some idiocy somewhere or another, or just have some silly fun. It's not a "family." There's this one particular publisher which runs a message board where all the happy-happy members (their authors only; no public input allowed) allude to themselves as "family."

I don't know about them, but my family is comprised of persons to whom I'm related by either blood or marriage. A message board community is, in fact, an Internet community. Inasmuch as most members don't actually "know" each other, have never met and probably never will, it can hardly be defined as a family in the truest sense of the word. Lord knows, sometimes board members bicker and fight but, at the end of the day, nobody's going to send everybody to their rooms and announce "Lights out." My members are not my children. It's not up to me to tell them what to say, how to say it, or that they can't say it.

Okay, rant over. And now on to regale you with today's lineup of Words Gone Bad, and they are bad -- the smelly, peeling zombies of the literary world. I see dead words.


Affordable council -- You don't have to go into debt to be able to bribe this local government.

Anotherwards -- Another one fighting off evil, in other words.

Disgussed -- The act of disrobing after you've been somewhere all gussied up.

Touchie -- What feelie people like to do.

Ledgend -- The end of the road for the wrestler known as The Ledge.

Distint -- Disparaging someone's choice of hair color; i.e., dissing the tint.

Played a small roll -- Pretending to roll down a short hill.

Lot's -- Wife?

Diint -- Making a reallly hard effort.

Probubly -- This is starting to piss me off. It's not a typo but so thoroughly consistent that it's clear the "writer" thinks this is the correct spelling.

Corrispond -- Small body of water in the town of Corris.

Compititive -- The spirit of a dedicated pit crew.