Words For My Enjoyment

“What’s your dog’s name?”

It’s a question that joins a slew of other questions that really, once you’ve gotten the answer, don’t have any true sensible follow-ups. It joins fellow non-followup’d answers to questions like “How old is your baby?”, “You’ve got allergies today too, huh?” and “Do you smell that?”

Yet today, I’d like to provide you with a slew of great follow-up responses to answers that have no true follow-ups. I’d like to provide you the tools for turning a quiet moment following a not-so-quiet response to your question, and give you the mad skillz to turn things around. And it’s bound to make your life in a world of non-followup’d answers to questions…much much easier.

Q: “What’s your dog’s name?”
A: Jack.

Potential Follow-Up Responses Include:

• Jack shit is more like it.
• As in Jack-oline Kennedy?
• Did you know Jack was mostly a common birth name for children in 1959?
• Hahaha. That’s hilarious.
• With a capital J, as in Jingo?
• Isn’t it funny how dogs sometimes have people’s names yet people hardly ever have dog’s names? What do you think it is about society that causes such naming trends to occur and do you think it has anything to do with the lexiconical trends of the English language? Cause I don’t.

Q: “How old is your baby?”
A: 17 months.

Potential Follow-Up Responses Include:

• If Paul Hardcastle changed the name of his classic song about Viet-Nam to “17″, then that would be your baby’s theme song!
• Aaah, seventeen months. Those sure were the days.
• If you said that to an old person who was hard of hearing and they thought you said “seventy” instead of “seventeen” not only would it take them awhile to figure out how many years that was, but they’d think your baby had some kind of syndrome or something.
• Well that’s one old baby now, isn’t it?
• Why you always gotta make everyone else feel like you love your baby more than your friends?
• I remember when I was seventeen months old. Back then, things like balls and prunes were my favorite things. These days it’s DVDs and prunes.

Q: “You’ve got allergies today, too?”
A: Big time.

Potential Follow-Up Responses Include:

• Did you know that if you take the word ‘pollen’ and remove the ‘p’ and replace it with the letters ’s’ and ‘w’ it forms a word that is an actual result of having allergies, big time?
• Allergies, schmallergies — suck it up, buttercup!
• Did you know that allergies are actually engineered biologically by a secret group of pollen experts in the bowels of Area 51?
• Big time? Seriously? Yes, okay. Sure, fine. Affirmative, allergies are GO no GO for launch. But ‘big time’? Who are you, Peter Gabriel or something?
• Allergies doesn’t rhyme with fallacy, but it should.
• I can only hope that someday, little white children and little black children with allergies can walk hand in hand and not sneeze on each other.