I had dark business at the DMV this morning.  There was nothing inherently dark about the actual business I had, but any day I am forced to darken the doors of the DMV, is, necessarily, dark.  I have long referred to the DMV as the LCD: the Lowest Common Denominator.  Because that’s what it is.  The Great Equalizer.  Everybody has to come here at some point.  And the only thing any of us has in common is the need to drive legally.  Other than that, I have no idea who any of these people are.  I know that we have exactly nothing in common.

Anyway, rather than go on one of my usual misanthropic rants, I’ve decided to let my experience determine the Word of the Day.  So let’s get to it.

Today’s lexical payload is a heavy one, specifically designed for those of you who’ve spend any amount of time observing the slow-motion car crash of human consciousness in the modern age.

The word is “bovinity.”

It’s a noun, meaning the quality or state of being bovine; a certain dull-eyed, slugging, and intensely phlegmatic disposition that suggests a total absence of cognitive friction.  It is the spiritual equivalent of chewing cud while the house burns down.

Derived from the Late Latin bovinus, from bos (ox/cow).  It’s an ancient way of saying someone has the intellectual velocity of a damp brick.

The fluorescent lights in the DMV waiting room didn’t just illuminate the space; they seemed to actively dissolve the remaining gray matter of everyone trapped within the four-minute-loop of the “Safety First” monitor.  At the center of this existential vacuum sat Brenda.
Brenda was a woman who’d “helped “me at my appointment here last week, whose primary engagement with reality appeared to be a series of involuntary autonomic functions – breathing, blinking, and the occasional, inexplicable wet noise of her tongue hitting the roof of her mouth.  She was currently staring at a potted fern on the counter in front of here with an intensity that suggested she was waiting for it to recite the Gettysburg Address or something.
I stood there, vibrating with a high-octane mixture of cheap espresso and righteous indignation, watching today’s clerk, Kevin, try to explain – for the fourth goddamn time – that I didn’t need the form that Brenda had sent me home to fill out last week.  Brenda didn’t even flinch.  She just sat there in her bovinity, looking more stupid than usual (which, just based on my very limited experience with her, is pretty fucking stupid), her jaw slightly slack as if her brain had finally decided to go on a permanent sabbatical to a place where thoughts are illegal and logic is a capital offense.  It was a terrifying display of sheer, unadulterated emptiness; a vacuum of such density that I feared my own IQ might start leaking out of my ears just by standing in her psychic splash zone. 

N.P.: “Cry of Love” – Crippled Black Phoenix