Today’s Word of the Day is Xanthippe.  It’s a noun meaning a shrewish, ill-tempered woman; a scold whose tongue cuts like my switchblade through butter.  Named after Socrates’ wife, reputedly a harpy of such mythic proportions she could make a philosopher question existence itself.

Derived from the Greek Xanthippe (Ξανθίππη), the name of Socrates’ spouse, whose alleged nagging became the stuff of ancient Athenian gossip.  First used in English around the 16th century to denote a woman whose vitriol could curdle wine.  From xanthos (yellow, fair-haired) and hippos (horse), though the etymological irony of “fair horse” for a termagant is a linguistic middle finger to decorum.  It’s either a weird flex or a sick burn, depending on how you look at it.

So there I am, three whiskeys deep into a Wednesday dusk, my typewriter humming like a junkyard Pontiac, when the air splits with the bellow of my neighbor, Brianna (we call her Big Brian), a “woman” built like a linebacker with the charm of a hungover wolverine.  She’s pounding on my door, her meaty fists rattling the hinges, hollering about a late-night drum circle that got going with some friends just back from Burning Man and the “goddamn jungle cacophony” of my half-feral parrots.  I fling open the door, shirt unbuttoned, a Camel dangling from my lip, ready to parry her outrage with my own.
“Brianna,” I snarl, “you miserable twat!  Your complaints are unwelcome.  Go back under your bridge and wait for your prandial goat to wander by, you troll.”
She looms, her face a topographic map of rage, eyes glinting like the business end of a chrome-plated shotgun.
“You degenerate goddamn scribbler,” she roars, “your noise is peeling the paint off my walls!”
The parrots, sensing blood, screech their approval from the living room, a feathered Greek chorus egging us on.  What ensues is a verbal cage match, a linguistic demolition derby.  She accuses me of harboring “a zoo for lunatics”; I counter that her nighty outdoor showers after swimming in her pool are traumatizing the local wildlife.  Her jowls quiver, her voice a foghorn of indignation, and I’m half-convinced she’s about to bench-press me into the next county.  But I’m no wilting poet – I lean in, whiskey breath and all, and lob a  barb about her grotesque yard décor, specifically her stupid fucking lawn gnomes, those “creepy ceramic bastards” staring into my soul.  She gasps, clutching her imaginary pearls, and I know I’ve hit the mark.
Then, in a moment of pure, unscripted glory, she unleashes her inner Xanthippe.  “You think you’re clever, you booze-soaked word-monger?” she thunders, her voice a sonic boom that sends the parrots into a flapping panic.  I’ll have your lease revoked faster than you can misquote Kerouac!”  It’s magnificent, her fury a force of nature, like a hurricane with a perm and a grudge.
“Lease?  I own this bitch!”  I cackle, salute her with my glass, and retreat to my typewriter, making a mental note to shit in their pool again the next time they leave town. 

N.P.: “One Way Or Anther” – Broken Peach