Different Slants

 by Robert M. Katzman © August 27, 2011

(1) Blow: To form one’s lips into a circle and expel air at varying velocities, in order to possibly remove something unwanted from a surface

(2) Blowing a Kiss: Same as above except also holding one’s hand, palm up, under one’s chin and, after making a gentle kissing sound, (which is exceptionally difficult to define) aiming the imaginary act of affection toward its intended recipient, expedited by air expelled somewhat more urgently while also eliciting a receptive response

(3) Blow Up!: Besides destroying one another’s advanced civilizations with incendiary bombs and rockets dropped from airplanes, also means a sudden argument gone out of control with supervisor, fellow workers, one’s spouse, customer, or, on particularly bad days, all of them

(4) A Harsh Blow: To strike another’s body or intellectual concepts without mercy.  Can also mean to undercut one’s self esteem and likely to stifle one’s advancement in an organization unless the perpetrator of the act is decapitated in reality and not just in one’s imagination

(5) Blow, as per Presidential candidate Barak Obama: Cocaine, which surprisingly, is an elective at major universities throughout the world

(6) Blow Off: Abruptly dismiss, as if to suggest one’s proposed imaginative idea is not only unwelcome by one’s supervisor or boss or significant other, but all future such efforts will be equally unwelcome

(7) Blow Over: A variation on the biblically encouraging “this too shall pass” meaning that even seemingly disastrous situations will soon, or eventually be forgotten, unless the mistake in judgment is a child conceived in passion with one’s secretary, in which case the mistake will grow larger and larger and larger, year by year.

(8) Blow!: To aggressively request someone whose presence is unwanted to leave suddenly, a threat being implied

(9) Let’s Blow this Joint: Choosing to leave a retail bar or restaurant by choice, suggesting dissatisfaction with service, quality or amount of food or alcohol, or especially, the lack of a cooperative attitude of other patrons in allowing one to know one or more of them more intimately. Almost universally a male expression of being unlucky and suggesting the illusion that someone, somewhere, possibly on Mars, will eventually find them irresistible

(10) Blown Opportunity: A wonderfully example of the linguistic flexibility of English, and why writing poetry is such a joy in the colonial language. This phrase means, 99% of the time, that a person failed to take advantage of what was offered to him, be it in business, education, travel or in a romantic or transitory relationship.

I say “him” on purpose because women are smarter and seem to know when to say yes, evaluating risk at lightening speed. If men were really smart, they’d be able to have babies, too.  But evolution obviously made a critical choice about whom to trust with future generations.

(11) Blow Job: The last in this lengthening list. Though evidently universally understood across the English-speaking world and virtually everywhere else the United States Army has been stationed for more than twenty minutes, is actually a misnomer about a male’s member, generally requiring a stiffening level of resolve on the part of both participants to properly execute what is desired and which, in an amazing reversal of logic, actually means: Suck.

Further, the United States of America, in this case, and possibly Canada, though both being, theoretically at least, lands of Liberty, Fraternity and Equality and unlike France, a severely neurotic European country with its own language police, use the term Blow Job, joyfully and in all cases without any gender classification whatsoever.  But which also would lead the arrogant French to say, illogically, that such a slanderous definition, sucks. Sacre Bleu!

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