Carrie S. has been struggling with something. I’ll let her explain:
When I’m not reading romance, I’m slogging through The Greatest Show on Earth by Richard Dawkins. Most of it is quite entertaining, but the section on embryology was just brutal. I am almost as entirely clueless about embryology as I was when I started the chapter. As a perk, however, it did provide me with several exciting new vocabulary words. Check this out:
“In neurlation, as in gastrulation, invagination is much in evidence.”
Invagi-what? Seriously? I’m just going to start saying that, all the time. People will either think I’m a genius or a total perv. But wait, there’s more! For my new favorite words in their full glory, I submit the following excerpt:
“Gastrulation and neurulation are accomplished early in development and they affect the whole shape of the embryo. Invagination and other ‘inflating origami’ manoeuvres achieve these stages of early embryology, and they and similar tricks are involved later in development, when specialized organs like eyes and the heart are made.”
If that doesn’t cry out for a contest, I don’t know what does. So, use the word “invagination” in a sentence (or sentences). Extra-credit for using “gastrulation”. If it involves inflating origami, so much the better. Winner to be chosen by means of Sarah’s magical random winner-chooser technology. Winner receives unending glory, and I will make a $25 donation to the American Red Cross in your name.
Get your dictionaries out and start writing!
SB Sarah adds: Standard disclaimers apply. We are not being compensated for this contest. Void where prohibited. Spay and neuter your pets. Wax on, wax off.
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of invagination.
Rod fingered the inflating origami of his ‘stache. The Duck Shack Agreement had been specific: No invagination. But Wendolyn’s burgeoning purity was burgeoning so excessively that it threatened to overflow the Shack’s poignant moats with the disturbing proof of her innocence. No, invaginate he must, and that right speedily.
After all, the Duck Shack Agreement had also specified no gastrulation, and look what that had got him: blue flames shooting out of his ass. Damn those anachronistic potatoes!
I’m nerdily proud to say that invagination has been in my working vocabulary for decades, and I once shocked my daughter by using it to describe the place where our chain-link fence deviates inward to accommodate the carport. Any word that enables you to shock your children is a winner, contest or no contest.
Debra was shocked to find that after feverish love making with the pool boy, the cake she had in the oven for the charity event had suffered an invagination at the center. “Gastrulation!” Debra shrieked, for it was the name of the pool-boy, who was french.
gastrulation… toughy.
Good to hear your reading Richard Dawkins! Though I’m surprised that bastula wasn’t in your list of favourite words.
One of my old bio professors used to claim that the most significant event in our lives is not birth or marriage, or anything else that happens after we’re born. Apparently, no matter what sort of odds you defy or obstacles you overcome, nothing you ever accomplish is as unlikely or dramatic as surviving gastrulation. Invagination got less air time, it’s just one of the steps in the process, but gastrulation made for a riveting story. Honest.
Cindy wanted Paul’s throbbing manroot in her dewy invagination, but Paul said he wasn’t up for it; eating beans for dinner had given him bad gastrulation.
Not an entry
Jargon is so cool, whether scientific, technological, domestic, or whatever. And its coolth is directly proportional to one’s ignorance. All this invagination has triggered a memory of my own fav piece of jargon, encountered during a work study stint at IBM back in the eighties. I worked as an editorial assistant in the in-house publications dept. and howled with laughter when I encountered the term “hot pluggability.” Just think what you all could do with that!
@JamiSings: Snooki, proof that God exists? That’s one pick-up line I’ll hazard The Littlest Orange One hasn’t heard.
In all seriousness, though, I’m loving this contest! Ben P wins, as far as I’m concerned, but honorable mention has to go to EbonyMcKenna. I could head Gene Wilder singing her entry to me, as I read.
I can’t think of anything that comes close to what y’all have already written. All I can say is that my next garage band will be called Occult Gonadal Mosaicism; look for our first album, Invagination!, at a record store near you.
Inadvertant death by gastrulation is such an unseemly way to go and, moreover, bespeaks a sad failure of invagination on the part of any solitary neurulator jaded enough to resort to so risky a manoeuvre whilst simply attempting to inflate origami.
This is most definitely not an entry in the contest, but OMLG, invagination is my favorite word EVER*, and I feel the need to share my love for it. The first time I heard it was in college, in an insect morphology class, and I fell in love with the word.Not only does it allow you say vagina with impunity, but Invagination sounds like a bitchin place to visit, no? I invite you all to start using the word as often as possible; it is, after all, a term for an infolding of something, or when a surface has been dimpled to make an internal pouch.
*Other than weasel, hippopotamus and cheddar, and nincompoop… okay, fine, it’s ONE of my favorite words ever.