Hocabulary

  DO YOU FIND words like “dudescussion,” “vagibberish” and “masturdate” funny? No? Good, you are a healthy reader. Just checking.

Earlier this month, HarperCollins published Brocabulary:The New Man-i-festo of Dude Talk by Daniel Maurer. Irony is skipped here, however, as the writing rollicks in the puerility of its subject matter; one reviewer, Carol Hartsell, wrote that Brocabulary is “targeted toward the coveted 18-34 date rapist demographic.”

Nevertheless, the book provided me with a unique opportunity.The assignment: find the right bar and use Maurer’s “brocab” to communicate with some real-life bros. I started out at Southern Hospitality, Justin Timberlake’s Upper East Side barbecue joint.

Southern Hospitality was showing a college football game that night, to be followed by round after round of beer pong. But once I sat at the bar, I immediately felt shy. Should I approach a man who’s brawny, temperamental and homophobic, I wondered, and try to use the word “guybernate”? Drink after drink, I couldn’t force it down. Finally, I settled for the women sitting beside me—Erika and Zoe, who turned out to be staffers at Essence magazine. “A lot of fine ladies here,” I said. “I feel like I’m in hoblivion.”

“What?” asked Erika. I tried some of the words I’d made up on my own, like dumper pumper (a guy who prefers the rear entrance) and Viagra balls (no definition for this one yet), but they were unimpressed. Exasperated, I explained my assignment.

“We ought to come up with some words for the other side,” said Zoe. “For the females.” Aha. Maybe we could offset Brocabulary’s chauvinism—too ugly and tiresome to be funny—with some good old-fashioned American equality. And so it began.

The girls would propose a sexual phenomenon, and we would work together to invent a sheologism. We started with the cast of clumsy characters in the bedroom. Zoe and Erika’s first complaint was of overex-blow-sure, endlessly waiting for guys to cum while performing oral sex. (I countered with stunted blowth, when your partner stops midway because you made some faux pas, or as an attempt at a sort of sexy tease.) We struggled to name the lady’s equivalent of blue balls, to describe the sudden cool down suffered by women whose men leave them hanging. I suggested depleasurization chamber. “Too cerebral,” said Zoe. Sorry, I said, but I did go to college for journalism.

“What about when a guy really likes sucking on your breasts?” said Erika. “I’ve never breastfed, but it’s like, is this what it is?” Some attention is of course welcome, but latch on and apparently that’s ugly suckling.

Equally unsexy, said Zoe, is the hair stresser, “the guy who grabs on way too tight.” They weren’t all disses, though.The girls needed a word for the generous man, the guy who devotes clitical care to a woman’s every need.That man is none other than Saint Thomas Vaginas. Saint V is also known, offered Zoe, as “the guy who fucks the ugly girl.” We moved on to the girls’ own gender.They introduced breeds of female that I, and probably most other men, never knew existed.

Erika admitted to being a Mag hag— she’ll only hook up with guys who fit into Magnum condoms. They have a friend, a total bank skank, who’s lenient about size but really digs guys on Wall Street.

Another friend is a hobile, she’ll booty text all night, “but if a guy’s like, ‘Hey come over,’” Zoe said, “she’s like, ‘No thanks.’” Then there are the lessbians,girls who aren’t really gay but who make out with other girls at the bar so that men will hit on them. Or the cumtortionist, Zoe proposed, “the girl who has to put herself into crazy positions in order to cum.” I posited gingina, the counterpart to whiskey dick, for the girl who can’t climax because she had too much to drink.

“That doesn’t happen,” said Zoe. “But one time I was with this girl, and she said…” I trailed off as I noticed the girls shaking their heads.

> Brocabulary

by Daniel Maurer. HarperCollins. 240 pages.