All purpose phrases

I need to break my habit of wanting to pronounce purpose as porpoise. Man.

When I was about twelve, I started to notice that there were a few phrases that could be used for almost anything. They were ideally ambiguous, vaguely familiar to people (via pop culture, in the best case scenario), and short.

I first became familiar with this phenomenon after a trip to the doctor's for my yearly check up. Probably I was around ten at the time. When my mother left me alone in the waiting room, I noticed a series of "growing up" pamphlets, designed to help struggling parents explain to their kids what exactly dicks and ovaries and pissing fetishes are. Two in particular caught my eye.

The first one featured a paternal figure sitting on a couch, looking at his son, gesticulating into the air while he apparently talked to the kid. I say apparently because for all I know, he was just doing some kind of guppy impression or demonstrating what a nice set of fillings he had. In any event, on the inside it had such pertinent questions as, "What's a vagina?" and "Is my penis normal?"

"Well," I thought, "How timely. I've just begun to question my dick's normality, and I heard someone say vagina once in a dirty context."

I surreptitiously swiped the booklet, along with another one called, "What happens if I masturbate too much?"

Later, I was perusing them in my room when I heard my mother coming towards the door. As she was about to open the door, I frantically stuffed the reading matter under my bed, and shouted the first thing that came to my mind.

"CHECK IT OUT NOW FUNK SOUL BROTHER," I screamed, in a falsetto that, in better times, could have netted me a position in a band where the people look moody and wear things that are trendy, but not trendy enough to label them as sell outs. This is important to them, because they must retain their street cred.

Incredibly, my mother stopped. She didn't open the door. She'd heard, at some point, Fatboy Slim's Rockafeller Skank, and was trying to figure out what the lyrics meant in this context, coming from her apparently castrated son. In the time it took her to realize that it was just gibberish, I'd hidden my contraband naughtiness and taken out a copy of EGM. I just sat on my bed, triumphant, and replied to her inquiry, "Yes, I would like some super hero themed underwear."

I felt awesome. Deception was my world now, mother. Oh, yes. You couldn't see the sly fox that your darling son had become. I casually stared at her, pretending, in my mind, to be Sean Connery in James Bond, right before he ordered a martini or revealed to the world that under the suit, his chest had the appearance of a caribou fur draped maggot.

Since then, I've evolved in the way that I use these phrases. In the proper group of people, a well dropped, "RUNNNN! Get back to dah choppah!" can be a useful way to buy myself some time to explain why I'm wearing a Madonna t-shirt. I hunt for those phrases now, in magazines and movies and music.

I even managed to net the last available Mountain Dew at the supermarket the other day by stunning the obese man reaching for it with, "Can't step to this!"

Yes, the depressed middle aged woman in the aisle who was fantasizing about getting married to the cashier at register three and moving away somewhere romantic and maybe she'd finally get a foot rub that fucking pig at home never gives her foot rubs maybe she should kill him, yes she clutched her child closer and eyed me with the same suspicion she normally reserves for the waiters at Red Lobster when she thinks they've added things to the bill.

Dammit, though. It was worth it.