Sometimes the WOTD Gives Us the Groove Master

The scurvy, flavescent insects in Washington are the carrion beetles of a dying world.

Oh God, I feel so linguistically erect.

'Flavescent' means to turn yellow or turn golden yellow.  A more typical use would be in admiration of the flavescent splendor of the trees in Autumn on a Vermont hillside but we're going for the more scurrilous interpretation and that needs snollygosters (i.e. politicians).

We don't need any specific bone drone from the cadre of flavescent flacks with flimsy foibles scurrying about Washington since the behavior is the same with all of them:  whatever D.C. wants anyone else to do you can be sure the poltroonish pantywaists of political persuasion won't do it themselves.

Flavescent slides off the tongue in a casual way

so it's an odd one to see but a great one to say

and ...

(Ed:  I'm warning you.  Don't get poetic.)

Take it easy.  That got away from me.

There was a joke which was quite common when I was young:

Q:  How are Marines like bananas?

A:  They go to war, turn yellow, and die in bunches.

Even as a kid I didn't get what's funny about it and I don't remember jokes, I never do, but this one sticks for all that time I guess because I never did get it.

Nah, I won't be calling the Marines flavescent but I'll damn sure use it for all the cowardly bastards in their expensive suits who send them to get killed.

Irrelevant side-question:  we need some genetics for remembering jokes.  If I hear a joke, maybe like most people, go five minutes later and I won't remember it.  Some people remember every joke or one-liner they ever heard.  Maybe the explanation is simply they're smarter than the rest of us.  Dunno.

That sucks only to remember jokes which weren't funny.  Maybe that's the recessive allele of the jokes-remembering gene, right.  When you're dominant for remembering jokes then you remember funny ones.  When you're recessive then you only remember ones which aren't funny and then they put you on late-night TV.

There you have it, folks, the Rockhouse Genetic Theory of Comedy.