Cocksure Opinion

Woody: Cocked and Ready

(Image from Wikipedia)

I had intended to post some incisive comments on the link between antisemitism and anti-Americanism, but something far more important has come up.

This morning, I received a puzzling email via the "Seoul Artists" e-list to which I belong. The message, written by a certain "Steelie McMath," asked me this pressing question:

"Ever dream of having a larger.. more thinker peniz!"

Or is this a question? It reads rather more like a curse. If we delete the "ever," substitute a comma for that disturbing, partial ellipse, and ignore the odd qualifier "more," we find:

"Dream of having a larger, more thinker peniz!"

That sounds imperative to me. Now, let's put "ever" back in, but in a position syntactically proper for a command:

"Dream ever of having a larger, more thinker peniz!"

As in "dream on, buddy"? Okay, I am being placed under a curse, an eternal one.

Now, I think that I know what a "peniz" is -- but let's retain this fortunate spelling -- and I can think counterfactually about what a larger one might entail, but in what way could one of those things be a thinker?

I don't deny that a peniz often seems to have a mind of its own, but that's more in the sense of a fixed mindset than a reflective one, so while it might be thought hard-set in its opinion, it's hardly thinking.

And I'm not sure that I'd want a "thinker peniz." With my luck, it'd be less Woody Woodpecker and more Woody Allen...