Strait shooting

Trump unleashes a verbal flank attack on Iran’s control of a crucial waterway

The two-member Supreme Council of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard holding an emergency meeting, about a verbal assault made by US prez, which involves Hormuz Strait, crucial to global trade.

Guard 1: The nerve of the guy! Wanting to change the name of the Strait!

Guard 2: The way he changed the name of Gulf of Mexico to Gulf of America, and is changing the name of a Florida airport to President Donald J Trump International Airport. He loves name games.

Guard 1: He sure does. But what the heck does his new name for the Strait mean? All anyone knows is that it has seven letters, begins with an f and ends with a g, and in between has five spiky things that look like six-legged spiders.

Guard 2: I think those spider things are called asterisks, and they’re used like verbal veils to cover up something that might cause sensation, scandal, and censorship.

Guard 1: OK, I get it. But what could this asterisked seven-letter word beginning with f and ending with g possibly mean?

Guard 2: Dunno. ‘Fitting’? ‘Fasting’? Maybe ‘Furlong’, though the Strait is much longer than that.

Guard 1: It could be ‘Fussing’, because it seems to have caused a whole lot of fuss.

Guard 2: Whatever this weird word might mean, it seems to be one big juju with major mojo, creating much epic fury.

Guard 1: It appears to be an adjective of ambidextrous ambiguity, a pronouncement of paradox, in that it can mean something which is either very, very bad, or its opposite, something that is fantastically good and wonderful.

Guard 2: Right. This all-purpose, one-size-fits-all word signifies either the depths of despair, or the elated highs of ecstasy.

Guard 1: It’s so potent and powerfully evocative that you have to asterisk it to use it in print, be it in the Reader’s Digest, the newsletter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, or TOI.

Guard 2: Whatever it is, it’s f five asterisks g our minds…

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