Didn’t get a lot of sleep last night, dear reader, through no fault of my own, of course.  I’m blaming The Crud.  If that’s what it is, this would the second time I’ve caught The Crud in 4-5 weeks, which is extremely rare for me.  It started with a sneeze sometime yesterday afternoon, which sneeze made my throat feeling a bit scratchy, which scratchiness made me pause and say, “Oh hell.  I hope it’s not The Crud.”  Alas, I’m afraid it was.
Dammit.
So here I am, on a couple choppy hours of sleep, in the studio, behind the Dissolute Desk, with a case of The Crud, ears popping, nodding off…better deal with the Word of the Day sooner rather than later…no idea what things will be like in a couple of hours.  So here we go.

Today’s word is a personal favorite, a little gem I discovered in the dank, forgotten corners of the dictionary during my misspent youth.  It’s a word that lets you dance right up to the line of decorum, give it a little wink, and then shit on its chest.  As a kid, this was one of my favorites because it sounded like a cuss word without actually being one.  You could yell “crapulous” across the playground and get the satisfaction of scandalizing your peers without the detention slip.  It was linguistic contraband, a loophole in the moral code, a way to fee dangerous while staying technically innocent.

Pronounced /’kræp.jə.ləs/ (KRAP-yuh-luhs), it means

1. Given to or characterized by gross excess in drinking or eating.
2. Suffering from such excess; hungover, debilitated, sick from overindulgence.

It’s the adjective form of “holy shit I’m dying because I tried to fight God and God won with a bottle of mezcal and a wheel of brie.”
Straight from the Latin pipeline: from crápula “drunken headache” (the Romans knew what was up), itself borrowed from Greek kraipálē “drunkenness or its consequence.”  First English sighting around 1530, back when people thought leeches were healthcare.  It’s been lurking in the dictionary ever since, waiting for the precise moment your soul leaves your body at 15:00 after a three-day bender.

My friend – let’s call him Kevin – agreed to a blind date.  The chosen venue, in a spectacular failure of romantic foresight, was “The Admiral’s All-You-Can-Conquer Seafood Trough.”  Yeah. 

His date, a woman named Brenda, viewed the buffet not as a meal, but as a personal challenge.  She was a whirlwind of gastronomic destruction.  A human backhoe clearing a path through snow crab legs, a Vesuvius of fried shrimp, a singularity of clam chowder.  Kevin, bless his accommodating heart, tried to keep pace.  He matched her plate for plate, a valiant by doomed effort to forge a connection across a growing mountain  of discarded shells and butter-slicked ramekins. 

Hours passed.  The sun set.  The tides of cocktail sauce receded.  Brenda, her face gleaming with a fine sheen of grease, finally pushed back her chair.  She had conquered.  She had one.  She looked at Kevin, whose face had taken on a pale, greenish hue, and asked if he wanted to go dancing. 

Kevin could only clutch his stomach, a vessel pushed far beyond its structural limits.  He felt a profound and deeply personal sickness blooming in his core, a testament to the sheer volume of aquatic life he had consumed.  He opened his mouth, but all that emerged was a weak, wheezing groan, the sound of a man utterly defeated by batter-fried ambition.  He was, in that moment, the living, breathing, and profoundly crapulous embodiment of a terrible idea.

He did not go dancing. 

It doesn’t just say you’re hungover.  It says you partied so catastrophically that your liver filed a restraining order and your dignity is still passed out in a Tijuana alley wearing someone else’s shoes.
Use it today.  Walk into the office, look your boss dead in the eye, and sigh, “I’m feeling profoundly crapulous.”  Watch his face as he tried to decide whether you just swore at him in Old Church Slavonic.
Crapulous.
Say it.  Love it.  Become it.
Now I’m going to take Nyquil, lie on the floor, and listen to the rain.

N.P.: “Overture 1812 – Finale – Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky” – ERock