Y is for...

[avram]

How it works: Comment on this entry and I’ll assign you a letter at random.
Write ten words beginning with that letter, and an explanation of what the word means to you and why.

immlass gave me a Y, goddammit. I ran grep "^[yY]" /usr/share/dict/words, and I’ve never even heard of like 95% of the results! But here goes:

yogurt

My daily breakfast: 1 cup of fat-free yogurt, with fresh berries mixed in. It’s delicious. The only healthy habit that stuck with me from that period of regular exercise and healthy eating a few years back. (Before that I would generally fry up some eggs and cheese, or have a bagel with something fatty or sugary.)

Yankee

Some of you won’t have heard this before: In the rest of the world, a Yankee is somebody from the USA. In the rest of the USA, a Yankee is a northeasterner. In the rest of the northeast, a Yankee is somebody from New England. In the rest of New England, a Yankee is someone from Vermont. In Vermont, a Yankee is somebody who eats apple pie with cheddar cheese on it for breakfast.

YHVH

Or does that start with T for Tetragrammaton? An ineffable name for an imaginary being.

Yiddish

My goyishe girlfriend speaks better Yiddish than I do. All those years of day school tuition, wasted! I wish I’d paid more attention, since Yiddish has the funniest jokes and most cutting insults.

yaw

Yaw, pitch, and roll are the three basic changes you can make to a spaceship’s orientation (or attitude, if you want the technical term). These were among the first surprising technical words I discovered as a kid — words whose mere existence implied vast new areas of investigation and imagination.

ypsiloid

Now I’m at the point where I’m just looking up the meanings of bizarre y-words. Ypsiloid means y-shaped. I’m going to be looking for excuses to use this one. Imagine how awesome it would be to play it in Scrabble.

youthfullity

I am not shitting you. Seriously, grep the MacOS X dict/words file. It’s in there. Whoever put it in was just totally making shit up. Maybe it’s a fake word for copyright purposes, like esquivalience.

Yossarian

I just read Catch-22. Just, as in I finished it Sunday night. Two observations: 1. The rule referred to in the title actually has several meanings in the book. The most famous is the first one cited, and probably the most clever, but by the end of the book — when Yossarian is told that Catch-22 says he can’t find out what Catch-22 says — it’s become apparent that the real meaning of Catch-22 is that people in authority can do whatever they want to people without authority. 2. Holy crap, this is the darkest black humor I’ve ever run into. I wouldn’t have believed it was possible to be both this funny and this nightmarish in the same book.

Yapple Dapple

When I was nine, there was an animated spin-off of I Dream of Jeannie on Saturday mornings, called simply Jeannie. In this show, Jeannie was freed from her lamp by a young surfer dude named Corry (voiced by Mark Hamill), and she had a sidekick, a fat, stupid genie named Babu. Every time Babu used his magic, he shouted “Yapple Dapple!” I might not remember this at all, except that when I was college, a couple of guys in my dorm started using “Yapple Dapple, even!” as a sort of all-purpose exclamation or punchline.

Yakov

The Hebrew version of my middle name, Jacob. (Is this cheating?) Y’know, my parents sent me to Jewish school to learn the traditions of our people, and then they named me after a guy who left his parent’s faith, and a guy who personally fought God to a standstill. What the hell were they thinking? (And what are the implications of my sciatic trouble of a couple months back?)

Comments

[mylescorcoran]

Okay, I'm game. Please give me a letter.

[avram]

Have a V.

[phrotus.livejournal.com]

I adore Catch-22, but I almost had to stop reading after Kid Sampson. (Or rather, if it hadn't already been too late, I suppose I might have almost stopped reading it.) I ate lunch in a daze that day. Sure, it wasn't the ten minutes of crying my guts out in the closet after finishing The Once & Future King, but hey, you can't win 'em all. (What do I mean by that?)

Assign me a letter!

[avram]

And your card is...an L!

[barking-iguana.livejournal.com]

I'd not heard of ypsiloid. But I now guess that Ypsilanti was so named because it had that shape.

The ", even" in your dormmates' exclamation suggests that Babu had the same voice actor as that gay cartoon lion I wrote about last year. I forget the name.

[avram]

Snagglepuss, I think.

[barking-iguana.livejournal.com]

Yep, thanks.

[avram]

And did you want a letter?

[barking-iguana.livejournal.com]

No thanks.

[bugsybanana.livejournal.com]

OK, I'll bite. Letter, please?

[avram]

It's N for you!

[jry.livejournal.com]

Fun! Can I play?

Must read Catch-22. (looks at to-read pile, sighs)

[avram]

Ouch, you've got Z!

[jry.livejournal.com]

Alrighty then. Be more fun than work, anyway.

e-s-q-u-i-v-a-l-i-e-n-c-e

[foxcoll.livejournal.com]

Thank you, Agrumer for introducing my to a fun new (fake-ish (it is in a dictionary, right?)) word.

I also love your defintion of a Yankee too. And now, I just must read catch-22.

Later.