perfidy

It's probably just me, but when I see a story headline like "CBC head quits after defecation, bestiality remarks", it's like I'm at a train wreck, or, for that matter, stuck in Houston traffic near an accident - I have to at least have a look. (Except for that last bit - I'm actually one of an apparently small number of Houston drivers who can ignore any accident that's not blocking the freeway, the better to avoid, well, blocking the freeway.)

At least that story's subject can easily be inferred from the title - the head cheese at the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. had a failure of editorial control, logorrhea, if you like, about a couple subjects, and got turfed for the indiscretion. Whatever works for the Canadian government, who had "lost confidence" in him.

The really difficult ones, I think are like this: "Dry as a dead dingo's donger", from the September 2, 2006 issue of The Economist.

Sadly, that one's behind the subscriber's-only part of the site, so it's not directly available to non-subscribers. (See note at end of entry, below)

My precognitive abilities fail on such a headline, starting with the fact that there are two words in the title itself that I had to look up. First, I didn't really know what a "dingo" is. I presumed it's the Australian version of a prairie rat. Until I saw that headline, I honestly didn't care. But by now, Wikipedia to the rescue, and I've looked it up. Pfft! Turns out it's just a wild dog. Next time I hear someone holler "Dingo took my baby!", I'll be somewhat more skeptical. Although, come to think of it, for a dingo to take someone's baby, it would seem necessary that a dingo be bigger than the prairie rat of my fevered imagination. So please forget that I mentioned the rat.

Second, what the hell is a "donger", I said to myself? I guessed it could have been some abstract, made-up name to play the foil in an odd humor piece, from the movie Sixteen Candles. Nahh, too simple. Other sites who've used that phrase long before September 2006 provided no further information on the matter, and, like the Economist, appear to have used it for its headline value, without informing me what, praytell, a donger actually was. Same deal with another site, talking about the return of American Idol, back in 2005. But the only reason for the use of the phrase in that context, according to the site's author, was, and I quote:

*did a search for "dry as a" and this was the funniest

Perhaps that's what drove the Economist's headline writer.

But I still hungered to know how I was supposed to process the word "donger", and so far, almost all I'd seen other than the aforementioned sites was a host of others referring to people (unfortunately, I presumed) named Donger. Or the Doneger Group, an outfit who really might reconsider their choice of search engine optimization service providers, unless I could come to the conclusion that there's nothing even remotely off-putting about this "donger" which can apparently be found attached to dead "dingoes". How many things could possibly fit such a set of criteria?

And things weren't looking good - I found a site defining "Dinker Donger", and it fit my preconception of the intended meaning. But remember - I had a preconception of what a dingo was, too, so I was willing to ignore that one, since it was a compound phrase, and might be inapplicable as a result. And I continued my search.

Since I was already at the Urban Dictionary site, a site that's clearly almost as authoritative as Wikipedia itself (and that's saying something!), I just used their search function to see if the word could be found, in isolation.

Turns out, it could. And it further turns out that while I suck at identifying common names for Cannis lupus dingo, my initial Spidey-sense that the Economist was having a funny on its readers was correct.

Oh, and according to that eminent authority, the Urban Dictionary, there are several other possible interpretations of the phrase "a dead dingo's donger", given that "dingo" (6th and 7th definitions) isn't always a "mythical (?) dog-like creature of Australia" (1st definition).

Who knew?

The Economist article, by the way, while listed at their site as unavailable to non-subscribers, has already been poached by a free site (though for all I know, they got reprint permission), and synopsified by another. So you can view the cut of its intended jib at either of those two places, if you don't subscribe to the Economist.

I'd have been more forthcoming about the article itself if its contents had had even the slightest thing to do with this post, but they don't, so I wasn't. However, it's an interesting article about an impending environmental crisis in Australia.

Not to repeat myself, but who knew?

[wik] After a casual re-read of this post, to check for typos, it occurred to me I'd missed one other possible interpretation for the CBC head's "retirement". It's the sort of thing James Taranto would have a field day with, if he wrote about articles on defecation and bestiality.

One could, if one didn't read the article, get the impression he was kicked to the curb (or do they spell it "kerb" in the Great White North, like the Brits do?) for having taken a shit (or do they refer to it as "leaving a shit" in the Great White North, like George Carlin used to?) right before launching into an extended dissertation about bestiality. Which might have been even funnier, come to think of it.