Happy Sunday, dear and I’m assuming by some of the mail I’ve received lately, occasionally drunk reader.  Today we crack open Uncle Jayson’s lexical grimoire and snort a line of pure lexicological blow.  Today’s word is somnolent, a slinky little adjective that slithers into your brain like a quaalude-laced dream.  As you likely know by now, dear reader, having endured the ruthless and brutal assault by the Woke on the entire English language, I no longer refer students to what-used-to-be trusted dictionaries for reliable definitions.  In fact it will soon be time to wage open war against the likes of Merriam-Webster, The OED, and the Cambridge Dictionary, and the rest of their pathetic ilk who became intentionally unable to define simple terms like “woman” for fear of angering The Mob.  But until I publish my own correct dictionary, we’re stuck with these losers.  So, according to the pussies over at Merriam-Webster, somnolent means “inclined to or heavy with sleep; drowsy,” but it’s got a deeper, slightly more sinister vibe – like the kind of torpor that hits you after a three-day bender on bootleg mezcal and existential dread.

Etymologically, it’s a highfalutin’ French-Latin mashup, from the Old French somnolent and Latin somnolentus, both rooted in somnus (sleep), the same root that gives us “insomnia” for all you night-owl freaks who can’t stop doomscrolling X at 3 a.m. It’s been narcotizing the English language since the 15th century, and it’s here to drag us into its hazy, half-conscious underworld.

I’m holed up in my favorite fleabag motel off Route 66, the kind of place where the roaches have unionized and the neon sign buzzes like a dying star. I’m three Red Bulls deep, trying to bang out a 5,000-word screed on the semiotics of reality TV for some pretentious lit mag, when my neighbor—a tweaked-out conspiracy theorist named Carl who claims he’s been probed by Martian IRS agents—starts pounding on the wall, screaming about chemtrails turning his goldfish into a communist. I’m somnolent as fuck, my brain a swamp of half-formed sentences and caffeine tremors, when Carl kicks down my door, buck-naked except for a tinfoil codpiece, waving a BB gun and yelling, “The lizard people are in the mini fridge!” I grab my laptop, hurl a half-eaten burrito at his head, and bolt into the desert night, leaving that motel hellhole to its own deranged circadian collapse. Moral of the story? Never trust a man who thinks his goldfish is reading Das Kapital.

That’s it, dear reader—somnolent, a word that captures the drooling edge of consciousness where nightmares and absurdity collide. Now go forth, wield it like a switchblade, and carve some chaos into your day.

N.P.: “Hot Stuff” – Blue October