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May 21

Abeyance

 

Up into the Mountains

 

Ice floes on the Hron.
Invitations of winter,
That say hallow to an icy dawn:

Crisp trees asleep,
Buried under winter’s white blessing,
The stark contrasts of this frozen world.
A fox hunting in snow laden fields,
Hopeful of a morning meal.

A falcon soars above,
The Mala Fatra its palate.
My train trambles up the slopes,
A world ablaze in white and brown,
The colors a frosted testament.
Teeming with life,
Languid in abeyance.
Not awaiting the sprouts of spring,
Comfortable in its lovely slumber.

∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞

*Abeyance*

Pronunciation:   a·bey·ance  (əˈbeɪəns)

Part of Speech:  Noun

Definition:

1. Temporary inactivity, cessation, or suspension
2. A state or condition of real property in which title is not as yet vested in a known titleholder (Law)

Etymology:1520s, from Anglo-Fr. abeiance “suspension,” also “expectation (especially in a lawsuit),” from O.Fr. abeance “aspiration, desire,” noun of condition of abeer “aspire after, gape” from à “at” + ba(y)er “be open,” from L. *batare “to yawn, gape”. Originally in O.Fr. a legal term, “condition of a person in expectation or hope of receiving property;” it turned around in English law to mean “condition of property temporarily without an owner” (1650s). Root baer is also the source of English bay (2) “recessed space,” as in “bay window.”

Other Forms:

Abeyant – Adjective

 

Synonyms:

Discontinuation, dormancy, inactivity, intermission, latency, postponement, quiescence, recess, remission, suspension, temporarily deferred, waiting, arrest, break, break-off, breather, cease, ceasing, close, conclusion, cutoff, desistance, discontinuance, downtime, end, finish, freeze*, grinding halt, halt, halting, hiatus, interruption, interval, layoff, let-up, pause, recess, remission, respite, rest, screaming halt, standstill, stay, stop, stoppage, suspension, termination, time off, time-out, break, breather, breathing spell, calmness, coffee break, comma, downtime, hiatus, hush, layoff, letup, pausation, quiescence, quiet, respite, silence, stillness, stop, time-out, tranquillity

May 7

Slather

A Tasty Treat           

           

 The unfettered pleasure of curly fries slathered lovingly with nacho cheese and all-beef chili was not wasted on Nigel’s keen imagination. He sat waiting; his head roved about the restaurant, not really noticing the rather askance geometry of the interior: round tables jammed into corners with angles too wide; octagonal tables butted against square tables with one angle cut off. He’d been here before, many times. All six tables were full. At Mama’s Place the tables were always full – unfettered pleasure eternally on the menu. If you didn’t’ want to gulp, guzzle, chomp, wolf and obliterate you wouldn’t end up sitting in Mama’s chipped, wonky, nondescript furniture. The floors were usually cleanish, the bathrooms questionable on good days, but the locals didn’t come see Mama for cleanliness – they wanted food.          

His eyes stopped at three high school girls. Ill-dressed as teen girls were wont to be, they tittered between themselves amid munches on burgers and the aforementioned fries; their mid-bite snorts cutely swinish in all its uncouth, teenage glory.  His eyes strayed up and down the smallest one – a petite mess kit of hormonal dilemma. Her future encounter with Mistress Big Ass had not yet begun, though her devouring of said burger certainly hastened the hour of her waifish demise. He didn’t care, he enjoyed watching the eventuality of sagging flesh as much as practicing the time honored gourmet art of Mac n’ Cheese Surprise.           

 He looked to the back corner of the restaurant for the waitress. She kept herself cleverly hid behind the squeaky-hinged, swinging doors, out of view of her patrons – a skill quickly mastered by any waitress worth her apron. He wanted his fries. He pictured them clearly in his mind, the glowing yellow cheese sauce a begobbed testament to processed wholesomeness everywhere. His stomach rumbled with eager anticipation of the coming slug fest.           

The teen girls continued to engorge. Their hands, eyes and mouths worked in unison upon a plate of “Fully Slathered Curly Fries.” They each used one hand for their phones and  one for the fries – with a good dose of slavered finger licking included – while carrying on muffled conversation concerning something he couldn’t, nor really wanted, to hear.           

Fries! I want fries! He thought as he watched his new teen fascination gobble down more gooey potato joy.           

           

 He looked away; their continued scooping, grunting, munching and crunching too much to take. He kept his eyes averted from the rest of the customers as well. He knew the totality of their devotions to Ba’al-zebub, Lord of Flies, were no different than the girls. Gluttony reigned at Mama’s Place, with ketchup smeared smiles and the slurp-slurp-slurping of homemade vanilla floats. No one kept ill-begotten hankerings of gluten-free, no MSG, lack of trans-fats here. Monks performed ablutions to attain further purity; Mama’s patrons gourmandized to a point just short of vomiting.           

 He closed his eyes and imagined himself as a giant Gibbering Mouther. He transformed into a protoplasmic greenish-yellow blob covered in multitude of broken-toothed, slobbering mouths and bulbous, blood shot eyes. He grew to the size of a large cow bloated with gas and let out a gurgling “rooooar blurgle blurgle” from his myriad mouths.           

           

“FRIESSSSSSS!” he screamed and moved towards the nearest table. A pair of two boys, also high school aged, dove from their chairs; their screams of fear lost on Nigel as he tore ravenously into what was left of their fries, burgers and floats. He grew larger; an oozing VW Beetle sized protoplasmic muck glob feasting on Mama’s multitudinous delights. He heard none of the terror erupting about the small restaurant, focused entirely on half-eaten plates of tastiness left in haste by the terrorized restaurant customers.           

He turned his attention to the teen girls’ table. Two of them had dove from the table and were rushing towards the door, but his elfin love muffin sat frozen, mouth agape, eyes protruding from her heart-shaped face. He moved with supernatural quickness; his protean form sloshed around chairs and tables as if they weren’t there. Thick tongue-shaped tendrils spread out toward her. He surrounded her and her table in a corpuscular hive of a thousand misshapen eyes, with a thousand lulling tongues and a thousand gibbering maws. She screamed and passed out face down in what was left of the plate of Fully Slathered Curly Fries. His oozed down on top of her…           

“Sir! Sir!” said a voice somewhere outside his consciousness. “Sir, please move I have your food.”           

He opened his eyes; the room swirled into view: same wonky furniture, same architectural catastrophe, same bored waitress. “Huh?” he mumbled and looked up at her, her normal bothered countenance evident. “Oh sorry,” he said, then blinked and sat back.           

She set down the tray filled with an extra-large size of Mama’s specialty and immediately left, an “enjoy your meal” muttered as she moved back towards the swinging doors that led into the kitchen.           

He gazed down at the plate and imagined his arms and hands metamorphosing into tentacles with bulging eyes and gnashing mouths at their tips. His years of roleplaying had once again acted as a utilitarian psychological aid to get him through the last gut wrenching moments before another bout with Mama’s famous culinary orgy. He closed his eyes, bowed his head, dedicated his food to The Pabst Blue Satyr – his personal deity – and commenced with the feast.           

∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞

*Slather*           

Pronunciation:     slath·er  (slæðər)            

Part of Speech:   Verb           

Definition:           

  1. To spread or apply thickly
  2. To spread something thickly on (usually fol. by with )
  3. To spend or use lavishly
  4. to squander or waste

Etymology:           

“Spread liberally,” 1866 (in Mark Twain), from a noun meaning “large amount” (usually as plural, slathers), first attested 1857; a dialectal word of uncertain origin, perhaps from Ir. Sliotar.           

Other Forms:            

Slather – noun (usu. collocates with ‘of’)           

Synonyms:
 
brush, catch a likeness, coat, color, compose, cover, cover up, daub, decorate, delineate, depict, design, draft, draw, dye, figure, fresco, gloss over, limn, ornament, outline, picture, portray, put on coats, represent, shade, sketch, slap on, stipple, swab, tint, touch up, wash, abrade, anoint, apply, bark, buff, burnish, caress, chafe, clean, cover, curry, daub, erase, erode, excoriate, file, fray, fret, furbish, glance, glaze, gloss, grate, graze, grind, knead, mop, paint, pat, plaster, polish, put, rasp, scour, scrape, scrub, shine, smear, smooth, spread, triturate, wear, wear down, wipe, acres, galore, gobs, legion, legions, loads, many, oodles, plenty, realty, reams, scads, slathers, slew, tons, wad.    

       

  

      

  

     

  

    

  

   

  

  

  
 

 

  
 

 

Apr 23

Gratuitous

…and finally we’ve reached the end of this particular storyline, certainly not the end of the story – it went on for years and is still plodding along merrily – but even Excerpts have to be fully excerpted at some point. I’ll try to take up the rest of this tale at a later date. Hope you’ve enjoyed it.

 

When Nouns become Verbs
Excerpt 4

(To read Excerpt 1 click here)
(To read Excerpt 2 click here)
(To read Excerpt 3 click here)

A few photos of the shortcut switchback from Zlobin to Križišće do exist though, luckily. They’ve helped revive that poetry; cellular recollection sometimes falters in the face of senility. J.B. was right; our trip from Zagreb to Otok (Isle) Krk did certainly seem to go faster to the bridge with the switchbacks. The panoramic view of the Dalmatian coast is the cliché adjective so often employed by hack travel writers: picturesque. Its picturesqueness is lecherous: a Slavic harlot positioned so lewdly on a street corner staring is a forgone conclusion. Downright disgusting really – whether the shortcut was faster or not didn’t really matter, that Slavic harlot deserved her due.

The juxtaposition of the Velika Kapela grey crags behind us with the myriad greens of cypresses, laurels and olives around us, and the blue that was too blue of the Adriatic before us demanded a good long stare. Mix in Dalmatian architecture that harkens back to the grand days of the Republic of Venice and I had to stop a couple of times just so I could get my looks; the other three had slavered and ooohed and ahhhed enough. Click- click went our cameras, “Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr” echoed from our throats. Dogs barked. Birds chirped. Locals looked up at us from their shaded verandas, more foreign barbarians invading their picture perfect paradise.

We rejoiced in our barbarism. The harlot frolicked around us in all her picturesque glory.

So the switchbacks, millionaire patron and Beethoven are partly to blame, but this all had to start long before that. Harmonic convergences don’t happen just for shits and giggles, there must be a point – or maybe not. Were you a harmonic convergence, wouldn’t you go about happening for shits and giggles? Is there a point to bikini clad Austrian girls? Yes. But their manifestation into our collective blurred vision happened after the bridge and “bridging” in question.

Could this tale, which I’m so obviously only brushing the edges of, reach all the way back to that time when I would pour over maps of the world and plan trips to such exotic sounding places as Timbuktu, Kathmandu and Dubrovnik? Since I am an actor in this circus then certainly that event did by extension and three decades hence help in my flavor being added to this stew.

Were this a novel we could play with the hourglass and trace this shoddy fiction back to such a source. That’s what fiction is for; you can do whatever you want with it. We are not versed enough in the paths that led Phad and Gar to that car, but I’m sure we could create footsteps if we wanted to. There is certainly blame to be laid in Waterford and a small fishing village on the northeast coast of Scotland. An email or phone call would suffice to gain enough snippets to create the territories that have already become geographies.

I know J.B’s multitudinous exploits well and that temporal tracing would prove no great task. His life was a chiaroscuro – the shaded parts all lit up with starshine and the bright, shiny bits immersed longingly in shadow.

But instead, let’s accept the fact that they did have just as momentous lives, in all their banality, like the rest of us, that brought them to that fateful crossing, where Gar was “bridged”, I drove, Phad laughed so hard it hurt and J.B pontificated about the virtues of drinking and driving with friends on an island in the Adriatic, while he cracked open a bottle of vodka bought at a small market in Benkovac Fužinski or Zlobin or somewhere along our route. We were close enough to our final destination in Baška that drinking was now an assured fact. I would be a fraud not to admit to it. A couple of congratulatory shots never hurt anything.

The damage done to Gar’s neurology on that bridge was nothing short of gratuitous. And gratuitous to the point it just made him more of himself – for better or worse. The following four days of gamboling about like lambs who’d broken into the wine cellar a few too many times, with questions from the Big Guy that went something like “if you could do anything what would it be?” certainly altered all of our lives to such a tremendous extent, that I can say – and I’m sure they’d agree – when you proclaim it to be “That Summer” and you’ve got the Muppets on your side, the invitation to life altering encounters is almost guaranteed.

We would end up, over the next three to four years, creating internet stars from nebulas, music out of fruit stands and companies with clever acronyms that hung about our necks like giant proverbial gorillas. Bridge can be used as both a noun and a verb, but look in any dictionary and you will not find a definition of “bridged” in reference to neurology, ontology and the unforeseen, irreversible side effects of driving across a bridge, with good friends, good music and such a remarkable amount of good nonsense that the lives of all those involved would never be the same again.

Phenomena was certainly the bedmate of mnamna; together they helped turn a long weekend road trip to a small lake in eastern Slovakia into a long week of fully funded, questionably restrained overindulgence on an island in the north Adriatic worthy of codification in the Annals of Momentous Experience that forever shifted geographies to such an extent only plate tectonics can explain it.

The End.

∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞

*Gratuitous*

Pronunciation:   gra·tu·i·tous  (grəˈtuɪtəs, -tyu )

Part of Speech:  Adjective

Definition:

1. Given unearned or without recompense
2. Not involving a return benefit, compensation, or consideration
3. Unnecessary or unwarranted; unjustified
4. Costing nothing
5. Not called for by the circumstances; without reason, cause, or proof; adopted or asserted without any good ground

Etymology:
1650s, “freely bestowed,” from L. gratuitus “free, spontaneous, voluntary,” from gratia “favor”. Sense of “uncalled for, done without good reason” is first recorded 1690s

 

Other Forms:

Gratuitously – Adverb
Gratuitousness – Noun
Synonyms:

God-given, accorded, aimless, allowed, amorphous, arbitrary, autonomous, baseless, bestowed, biggety, bluff, bottomless, brash, capricious, casual, charitable, cheeky, chutzpadik, cocky, complimentary, contemptuous, costless, crusty, de trop, derisive, desultory, disarticulated, discontinuous, discretional, discretionary, disjunct, disordered, dispensable, dispersed, disproportionate, disrespectful, elective, eleemosynary, erratic, excess, expendable, expenseless, expletive, facy, fitful, flip, flippant, for free, for love, for nothing, formless, free, free as air, free for nothing, free gratis, free of charge, free of cost, free will, freebie, fresh, frivolous, gally, giftlike, given, granted, gratis, groundless, haphazard, hit-or-miss, immethodical, impertinent, impudent, in excess, inchoate, incoherent, indefensible, independent, indiscriminate, irrational, irregular, malapert, meaningless, misshapen, needless, nervy, nonessential, nonmandatory, nonsymmetrical, nonsystematic, nonuniform, offered, on the house, optional, orderless, pert, planless, pleonastic, proffered, prolix, promiscuous, providential,random, reasonless, redundant, rude, sassy, saucy, self-acting, self-active, self-determined, self-determining, senseless, shapeless, smart, smart-alecky, smart-ass, spare, spasmodic,spontaneous, sporadic, straggling, straggly, supererogatory, superfluous, systemless, tautologic, tautologous, to spare,unarranged, unasked, unbesought, unbidden, unbought, uncalled-for, unclassified, uncoerced, uncompelled, undirected, unessential, unforced, unfounded, ungraded, ungrounded, uninfluenced, uninvited, unjoined, unjustifiable, unjustified, unlooked-for, unmethodical, unnecessary, unneeded, unordered, unorganized, unpaid-for, unpressured, unprompted, unrequested, unrequired, unsolicited, unsorted, unsought, unsupportable, unsymmetrical, unsystematic,untaxed, ununiform, unwarranted, unwelcome, vague, verbose, voluntary, volunteer, vouchsafed, wandering, wanton, willful, willing, wise-ass, without charge

Apr 9

Shoddy

When Nouns become Verbs
Excerpt 3

 (To read Excerpt 1 click here)
(To read Excerpt 2 click here)

We met Lady Babs at the train station in Košice about 80 minutes later. She joined Mr. Critter and the Big Guy in one car; I, Gar, Phad and J.B started our trip across Slovakia to our homes in Banska Bystrica and the long, lost and winding trip that led to ‘The Bridge’ some 22 hours later in another car. Lady Babs tried for hours to reach the rental car agency, without success.  She was the only one who spoke Slovak well enough, being a native speaker, to actually explain our current plan of action to the unaware rental car employee.

We continued forward across Slovakia and into Hungary, effectively stealing the rental car before she actually got ahold of them and gave them the unfortunate news that we didn’t know when we would return their car. It was a Sunday, they were closed. We were supposed to just drop the car off. Contract ended, no Official Highway Sticker from the agency to drive in Hungary or Croatia, we didn’t stop, we didn’t care.

“Mnamna mnamna” echoed from our windows as we traversed the Hungarian countryside towards Budapest. Not much they could do anyway, we wouldn’t be back for days. At least we contacted them. They could blame us later if the car came back in shambles.

When it comes to laying blame for actions, time gets all skewered; it squeals and kicks about and causes a general clamor.  You try to somehow devise a linear map that conforms to a certain geography. You say yes, becoming “bridged” while driving over Krk (Neck) Bridge leading to the Isle of Neck (Krk) with the crescendo of the Ode to Joy starting at the precise moment of your cars’ tires touching the aforementioned bridge, all seems rather like shoddy fiction.

Why is it always the Ode to Joy? Kubrick should have the patent on that, but he doesn’t. For reasons unbeknownst to most parties involved it’s always the Ode to Joy, 1812 Overture, Carmina Burana, The Requiem or Conan Soundtrack that ushers in momentum. Sure other music gets it due, but there are certain movements that cause a palpable warping of the air around us in ways many fail to recognize or would rather not acknowledge.

Reality is shoddy fiction. Sometimes freckles are actually a faerie’s kiss but no one wants to admit it, coincidence is coincidence and eventually everyone draws a Royal Flush. Who really wants to read about their own droll lives anyway? When you’ve got The Muppets on your side for three months, then you can make a mockery of reality, fiction tips its hat and hands you the stage, you throw the money back at passersbys on the boardwalk appreciating the busking with a “go get more beer!” and become a “Rent a Party” replete with a three room villa paid for by the Big Guy, skinny dipping at 3am, blond Austrian sisters and beer with ice cream for breakfast. Whew!

Some instances just happen to have the patent on cool music. If you’ve never pimped out two of your friends’ guitar playing talent, on seaside promenade, in a party city along the Adriatic coast, then you should. Put it on the calendar, order a millionaire to fund the whole operation – unexpectedly is best, it adds to the whole universe of incalculability – get the friends with guitar talents, call in an air strike of alcohol and vacationers; add in details.

I can’t honestly picture that bridge at this time. I don’t’ remember how fast we went over it, at what speed we reached it, how high it was, if it had two or four lanes, what color it was, if it was made of metal or stone; nor can I picture the view across it (no photos that I know of exist for that moment), whether it bubbled out of the piercing blueness of the Adriatic or stood high above it, how many cars were on it, if it had a smile on its face or was giggling. I do know the crescendo of the Ode to Joy started precisely the moment our tires touched the bridge. That’s irrefutable; it’s felt in the cells.

That’s what happens when memories transmute from a biological phenomenon located in the neurons of the brain to a biological phenomenon located in every cell of the body. Your big toe becomes a font of experience, its mitochondria doing somersaults to Johnny Cash in a villa with a perfect view of the sea at sunset; your skin cells overflow with remembrance and do the twist as their golgi apparatus hop scotch to the soft susurration of sea as you float on your back during a morning swim; your buttocks considers taking up residence permanently on the Baška beach while its endoplasmic reticula perform a ballet of stunning precision with beer in hand. Photos and memories become insufficient reminders after they’ve transfigured into poetry.

(click here to read Excerpt 4)

∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞

*Shoddy*

Pronunciation:   shod·dy  (ʃɒdi)

Part of Speech:  Adjective

Definition:

1. Of poor quality or inferior workmanship
2. Intentionally rude or inconsiderate; shabby
3. Pretentious vulgarity
4. A fibrous material obtained by shredding unfelted rags or waste – mungo (noun)
5. a fabric often of inferior quality manufactured wholly or partly from reclaimed wool (noun)

Etymology:
1862, “having a delusive appearance of high quality,” from earlier noun meaning “wool made of woolen waste, old rags, etc.” (1832), of uncertain origin.

Other Forms:

Shoddy – Noun
Shoddies – Noun plural
Shoddily – Adverb
Shoddiness – Noun

Synonyms:

Abject, abominable, affected, apocryphal, arrant, artificial, assumed, atrocious, awful, base, bastard, beastly, beat-up, bedraggled, beggarly, beneath contempt, blameworthy, blowzy, bogus, broken-down, brummagem, brutal, budget, careless, cheap, cheapjack, cheat, cheesy, chintzy, clamjamfry, clinquant, colorable, colored, common, contemptible, counterfeit, counterfeited, crappy, crummy, debased, debris, degraded, deplorable, depraved, despicable, detestable, dilapidated, dingy, dire, dirty, discreditable, disgraceful, disgusting, dishonorable, disreputable, distorted, dowdy, down-at-heel, down-at-the-heels, drabbletailed, draggled, draggletailed, dreadful, dressed up, dummy, dust, easy, economic, economy, egregious, embellished, embroidered, enormous, ersatz, execrable, factitious, fake, faked, fakement, falsified, feigned, fetid, fictitious, fictive, filthy, flagrant, forgery, foul, frame-up, fraud, frayed, frazzled, frowzy, frugal, frumpish, frumpy, full of holes, fulsome, garbled, gaudy, gimcracky, good-for-naught, good-for-nothing, grave, grievous, gross, grubby, hateful, heinous, hoax, holey, horrible, horrid, ignominious, illegitimate, imitation, impostor, in rags, in shreds, in tatters, inexpensive, infamous, inferior, informal, inglorious, junk, junky, lamentable, litter, little, loathsome, loose, lousy, low, low-down, low-priced, lumber, lumpen, make-believe, makeshift, man-made, manageable, mangy, mean, measly, meretricious, messy, miserable, mock, moderate, modest, monstrous, mussy, nasty, nefarious, negligent, no-account, no-good, noisome, nominal, not worth having, not worth mentioning, not worthwhile, notorious, nugacious, nugatory, obnoxious, odious, offensive, outrageous, paltry, paste, patchy, pathetic, perverted, petty, phony, pinchbeck, pitiable, pitiful, plastic, poky, poor, pretended, pseudo, put-on, put-up job, quasi, queer, raff, ragged, raggedy, rank, ratty, reasonable, regrettable, reprehensible, reptilian, repulsive, riffraff, rip-off, rotten, rubbish, rubbishy, rubble, ruinous, run-down, sad, scabby, scandalous, schlock, scraggly, scrap, scrubby, scruffy, scummy, scurvy, scuzzy, second-rate, seedy, self-styled, sensible, shabby, shady, sham, shameful, shocking, simulacrum, simulated, slack, slatternly, sleazy, slipshod, sloppy, slovenly, sluttish, small, so-called, soi-disant, sordid, sorry, spurious, squalid, supposititious, swindle, synthetic, tacky, tattered, tatty, tawdry, terrible, tin, tinsel, tinselly, titivated, token, too bad, torn, trash, trashy, trivial, truck, trumpery, twisted, two-for-a-cent, two-for-a-penny, twopenny, twopenny-halfpenny, unauthentic, unclean, unexpensive, ungenuine, unkempt, unmentionable, unnatural, unneat, unreal, unrespectable, unsightly, untidy, valueless, vile, villainous, warped, whited sepulcher, within means, woeful, worst, worth the money, worthless, wretched

Mar 26

Hodgepodge

Sometimes while sitting at home watching television, or reading a book, or just ruminating upon the vast complexities of the universe you become hungry. I’ve been there, you’ve been there, we have all, at some point in our lives, felt the pangs of hunger deep within our stomachs. And yesterday that very circumstance happened to me. So I climbed out of bed (I was reading The Economist at the time), stood rather shakily, and wandered into my kitchen to open the refrigerator. But alas! I had nothing! My refrigerator, though not empty, stared back at me with the glare that only sadistic refrigerators can give you when you are hungry, but too lazy to cook. Yes, it contained food, a mixture of diverse elements that can only be described as a lackluster hodgepodge of far too much work. So I growled at it, shook my head, closed it and ordered pizza instead, claiming victory yet another time!     

     

∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞

*Hodgepodge*     

 Pronunciation:     hodge·podge  (hŏj’pŏj’)     

Part of Speech:  Noun     

 Definition:     

  1. A heterogeneous mixture; jumble. A motley assortment of things.
  2. (Law) The gathering together of properties to ensure an equal division of the total for distribution, as among the heirs of an intestate (a person who dies without a legal will) parent.
  3. A theory or argument made up of miscellaneous or incongruous ideas.

Etymology:     

From Old French, Hocher, which means stew or to shake together.     

Also an alteration from the Middle English Hochepot or Hotchpot, which means mixture.      

Hodge-podge or hotchpotch or hotch pot is an English expression often used negatively, denoting a “mixture” or “medley” of things. It is derived from the Middle English word hochepot and it is a: “Dish of many mixed ingredients, especially mutton broth with vegetables. This meaning of the word can still be found in the Dutch word “hutspot” (a dish of mashed potatoes with carrots and onions).     

Synonyms:
 
Agglomerate, agglomeration, alphabet soup, assortment, botch, clutter, collage, crazy quilt, farrago, gallimaufry, grab bag, gumbo, hash, miscellany, hotchpotch, jambalaya, jumble, jungle, litter, macédoine, medley, mélange, menagerie, miscellanea, mishmash, mixed bag, montage, motley, muddle, olio, olla podrida, omnium-gatherum, pastiche, patchwork, patchwork quilt, potpourri, ragbag, ragout, rummage, salad, salmagundi, scramble, shuffle, smorgasbord, stew, tumble, variety, welter.  
Related Words: 

  

Detritus, notions, oddments, odds and ends, sundries; accumulation, aggregate, aggregation, conglomerate, conglomeration; catchall; admixture, alloy, amalgam, blend, combination, commixture, composite, compound, fusion, intermixture, mix-up; bollix, chaos, confusion, disarrangement, disarray, disorder, dog’s breakfast, mess, morass, muddle, shambles; imbroglio, knot, snarl, tangle.    

 

 Notable Mention:     
 

  1. Hodge-Podge the rabbit is a fictitious character from Berke Breathed’s comic strip Bloom County. His best friends are Portnoy and Cutter John. Hodge is extremely conservative and fanatical about most things, though often ignorant and naive about just what those things are. When he found out that Portnoy was a Groundhog, Hodge stopped speaking with him because he did not associate with “pigs”. The two eventually made up. Hodge later had an affair with Rosebud the Basselope, resulting in Rosebud’s pregnancy.
  2. The Principia Discordia (the holy book of Discordianism) describes the relation of HODGE-PODGE to The Sacred Chao (Discordian holy symbol) as follows: “The Sacred Chao is not the Yin-Yang of the Taoists. It is the HODGE-PODGE of the Erisians.”

   

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