The Verb

Statutory Warning: What follows is an inane attempt at extremely lame humor. Go away NOW with your sanity and temper intact. I won't accept any part of the blame from the next line onwards.

Apart from being mammals, having four limbs and having six lettered common nouns starting with the letter 'H', there is a similarity between horses and humans. Both of them wear shoes. There is one more thing, a noun starting with the letter 'H', which is similar in the two. Horns. The similarity is that you won’t find horns on either. If you are wondering where this is going, I shall let you know that once I figure it out for myself but in the mean while I can assure you that this is definitely going to end. Before the end, though, let me tell you that I am not attempting to write something about either Horses or Humans. Nor am I planning to write about Horns or Shoes.

The point of interest today is a rather interesting verb that comes into being when two nouns are hurled violently against each other. The nouns are Shoe and Horn and if they have a head-on collision, we end up with Shoehorn, which is a rather interesting concept that I first came across on a TV show. It was some kind of car customization show where some Joe Public's car is whisked off the road, souped-up, pimped out and returned back to the owner amidst lots of what I like to call 'reality show love'. I don't remember the name of the show but the main guy, the soup-up'er and main pimp'er man, was a guy called Chip Foose. And the one thing that was regularly bandied about was 'shoehorn'ing some xyz engine into an abc car.

I must have been hooked pretty hopelessly, for me to remember so much of that show and remember the verb. Anyway coming back to that verb now, according to some of my well placed sources, I have come to find out that it means "To force into a limited or tight space". My current interest in that word stems from that meaning. Remembering those guys on that show putting in that big, bad looking engine into the that tiny looking engine compartment of the equally tiny looking car, I started thinking that may be I should try this shoehorning thing myself and see if I can fit an after-market brain into my miniscule brain cavity, which is right now living up to its name.