5/09/2013

Word of the Day: Scomm

I've learned a new word: "Scomm". The traditional meaning is "buffoon", which would be useful, but that's not where I saw it, or how it seemed to be used. Over on Yahoo! News, an article on how the dead Boston terrorist's body is still sitting in a funeral home's chiller, unable to find a cemetery willing to accept and bury him, has been producing some of the most vicious and ugly comments I've ever seen.  Considering that "ugly" tends to be the default mode for Yahoo! commenters, that's saying something. Essentially, it's a post-mortem lynch mob there. I posted a comment that this behavior was unseemly and un-American. One reply included the remark "Scomm goes back to scomland."

If the guy replying to me was actually using that in the obscure meaning of "buffoon", I don't think that was accurate. "Buffoon" is not how I would describe someone who killed multiple people, maimed and wounded dozens of others, engaged police in intrense firefights in public streets, managed to get an entire city to shut down for 24 hours (at an estimated minimum economic cost of a quarter-billion dollars), and triggered a national spasm of the ugliest side of Ugly-Americanism since 9/11 (that he's been able to continue even after his death). I would not call that guy a buffoon; I would call him a Very Successful Terrorist.

My responder might have simply been misspelling "scum", rather than using an obscure word. He didn't know how to spell "Christian" properly, either. (Somewhere, some poor guy named Christien is having the nagging feeling that people are saying nasty remarks about him on the Internet.)

But "scomm", that's a useful word. I'll remember it.

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