Wednesday Tex wasn't in the office for staff meeting, and I was glad because CoolBoss used my HumanDictionary function when she needed "prurience" defined. I asked for someone to pitch out the worst of the reality television shows, and then I said that these shows appealed to the public's prurient interests, and prurience was the noun for base and usually gratuitously sexual interest. The example was "Lawmakers in furor over prurient turmoil" and she rightly questioned turmoil being prurient.*
This discussion might have made squeamish Tex squirm, so I was glad he wasn't there. Except that naturally on Friday when he asked me what had happened in staff meeting, I was compelled to needle him so said, "I had to define 'prurience' and I'm really glad you weren't there." He said, "What?" and I flipped his dictionary open, pointed out the word, and left the room just as his phone rang.
* I don't know if there is a technical term for misassignment of adjectives. Recently CoolBoss asked me why a divorce couldn't be called "amiable," and I more felt than could articulate why. Because people and dogs are amiable but relationships and concepts are amicable, like divorces and treaties. You might say "an amicable gathering" but you'd say "a gathering of amiable people" or "an amiable gathering" where "gathering" was a grouping word rather than a description of the ties among the people.
Later in the day Tex asked what constituted a divine period. Was I on a crystal clear, snow-covered mountain top, communing with the sun or something? We got that cleared up by my clarifying that I had had to define 'prurience,' not that I had had a divine period, for pete's sake.
But this allowed me to tell a recent amusing story. When CLH was here, we had lunch with an Aspen friend who now lives in Denver. As the three of us chatted, I announced, "I think I'm getting my period." I left them at the table to go a-questing for supplies. We were at trendy 32nd and Lowell, which means that clothing, books, gee-gaws, and antiques were available to me, but tampons there were none. I drove to Walgreen's, picked up a box of 40, and scampered to the counter. Except that someone evidently had shop-lifted one out of the box, whose end was therefore loose, which instability I didn't notice until 39 tampons suddenly skittered underfoot--under my own feet and those of at least four people, including a man and children, around me. I debated for a tenth of a second whether to gather them, decided fuck no, returned for another box, and beat a hasty retreat with a box of 20, that having been the last 40 (or 39).
CLH and her friend were amused, of course, and CLH told us an incident from when she worked at Souper Salad, fishing in her apron pocket for a pen to take an order and poising a tampon over her order form to write with because she hadn't looked at what she'd retrieved.
Tex told me in turn about a coworker's being pulled aside by apparently a new employee of the TSA who had not been properly briefed and whose cultural background rendered him a lot less likely than, say, Tex, to know certain things. The TSAer, searching her purse, extracted a tampon and, waving it, demanded to know what this was. I can picture Coworker's efforts to restrain herself from saying, "You want me to show you how that works?" and instead calmly to inform him that it was a feminine hygiene product.
Anyway, I'm glad we got that cleared up.