I love woids. Depending on how they are selected and ordered, woids can serve as wonderful playthings or deadly weapons. My friend Brian, the Air Force Vet, brightened my day by sending me a terrific example of the former.

Enjoy!

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Here is the Washington Post’s Mensa Invitational for 2006, asking readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply a new definition.

Winners are:

1. Cashtration (n.): The act of buying a house, which renders the subject financially impotent for an indefinite period of time

2. Ignoranus: A person who’s both stupid and an asshole

3. Intaxication: Euphoria at getting a tax refund, which lasts until you realize it was your money to start with

4. Reintarnation: Coming back to life as a hillbilly

5. Bozone (n.): The substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas from penetrating. The bozone layer, unfortunately, shows little sign of breaking down in the near future.

6. Foreploy: Any misrepresentation about yourself for the purpose of getting laid

7. Giraffiti: Vandalism spray-painted very, very high

8. Sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn’t get it

9. Inoculatte: To take coffee intravenously when you are running late

10. Hipatitis: Terminal coolness

11. Osteopornosis: A degenerate disease (This one got extra credit.)

12. Karmageddon: It’s when everybody is sending off all these really bad vibes, and then the Earth explodes and it’s a serious bummer

13. Decafalon (n.): The grueling evemt of getting through the day consuming only things that are good for you

14. Glibido: All talk and no action

15. Dopeler effect: The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly

16. Arachnoleptic fit (n.): The frantic dance performed just after you’ve accidentally walked through a spider web

17. Beelzebug (n.): Satan in the form of a mosquito, that gets into your bedroom at three in the morning and cannot be cast out

18. Caterpallor (n.): The color you turn after finding half a worm in the fruit you’re eating

The Washington Post has also published the winning submissions to its yearly contest, in which readers are asked to supply alternate meanings for common words.

And the winners are:

1. coffee, n. the person upon whom one coughs

2. flabbergasted, adj. appalled by discovering how much weight one has gained

3. abdicate, v. to give up all hope of ever having a flat stomach

4. esplanade, v. to attempt an explanation while drunk

5. willy-nilly, adj. impotent

6. negligent, adj. absentmindedly answering the door when wearing only a nightgown

7. lymph, v. to walk with a lisp

8. gargoyle, n. olive-flavored mouthwash

9. flatulence, n. emergency vehicle that picks up someone who has been run! over by a steamroller

10. balderdash, n. a rapidly receding hairline

11. testicle, n. a humorous question on an exam

12. rectitude, n. the formal, dignified bearing adopted by proctologists

13. Pokemon, n. a Rastafarian proctologist

14. oyster, n. a person who sprinkles his conversation with Yiddishisms

15. Frisbeetarianism, n. the belief that, after death, the soul flies up onto the roof and gets stuck there