The antonym of density and a dearth of suffixes

 (picture not related)

Back when publishers printed the daily news for local areas on paper (if you will believe it) made of tree pulp, There was a little trivia column that was nationally syndicated that was called L.M. Boyd.  L.M. Boyd was the name of the guy who wrote the column, which was usually a collection of sentences which didn’t have to do with each other, except that each sentence was a fact, and it was usually a surprising fact.  Though Mr. Boyd wasn’t above periodically taking these facts out of context, one did get the impression that he was wont to do scrupulous research to determine, before a factual sentence made the cut , that it was, in fact, a factual sentence, at least in some sense.  Today’s blog is inspired by L.M. Boyd, except that I have trouble expressing everything I want to about a topic in a sentence, even a run-on sentence, and also I don’t care if what I’m saying is actually true or not.  In fact, I think today’s blog may have almost nothing to do with L.M. Boyd at all.  I’m not sure now why I brought it up, except that I was thinking about it. 

The other day while playing Frisbee with my dogs at the lake, which for some reason everybody calls a bog, the dogs missed a pretty long throw.  This is not really something I fault them for.  Riley is, God bless him, kind of a pussy when it comes to water, and doesn’t normally like to get his belly wet, though for some reason, he’s willing to swim at the lake, but I knew that he wouldn’t go for a Frisbee that was out that far.  I was throwing the Frisbee for Ursa.  She loves to swim out and fetch things, and will do it whenever the opportunity presents itself, and would probably continue to do it until she collapsed from exhaustion or hypothermia.  She’d have gone out ten times for that Frisbee, but she was distracted right when I threw it, because we were actually sharing the beach with ten other dogs and their attendant humans. 

Connor’s bog is an off-leash dog park, and for some reason, there is a narrow stretch of the lake, maybe forty feet of beach, which has sand on it.  The rest of the shore is mud, sticks, brush, and moose.  So people kind of stick to the sandy section.  This works well for the wildlife that are trying to raise a family in the area, but it does get a little crowded there from time to time.  I’m afraid that, with so many butts to sniff and so on, Ursa was distracted at a critical moment, and within a few minutes, the prevailing winds had pushed the Frisbee out to the middle of the lake, where lillypads grow.  After a few minutes of hemming and hawing on the beach, during which time it was determined that I had on a pair of underwear which bore some resemblance to swim trunks, I decided the smartest thing to do was to swim in after the Frisbee myself. 

I waded in to my knees, and it was warm water.  Warmer than you’d think a lake of this size would be at that time in the afternoon in Alaska, in fact.  Then, as I went on,  I began to sink into a substance that was some species of mud.  I then waded into that.  It was extremely thin mud, having a lake on top of it to keep it nice and wet, so it wasn’t very sticky, and so, I didn’t actually begin swimming until I was wading in mud to my thighs, when the water was above my navel.  It was about this time that I began to appreciate the distinction between a lake and a bog.  A bog, you see, is a lens of water that sits on a lake of mud. 

A person of a less hearty disposition would have probably decided to turn back at this point, but I felt I had committed to this course of action, and I wasn’t coming back empty-handed.  I squelched on.

When I got to the part of the lake with the lillypads, I found the Frisbee, and I also found two forlorn and hopeless tennis balls, which I offered a ride back to shore.  They accepted, although one of them did momentarily find itself lodged in the top of the mud, where I lost it.  It returned soggily to the surface a few minutes later with a story about its own heroism in the face of muddy specters to terrible to repeat, which I didn’t believe for even a moment.  I was simply not in a good position to believe things like that about the mud that hovered below me, or I would have freaked the fuck out. 

We got back to the shore and dried out.  Well, I dried out (mostly) and the ball was almost immediately descended upon by a pack of ravening dogs, who collectively slobbered on it.  I had no sympathy.  I wringed out my underwear as best I could.

Eventually, I decided to put my clothes on, because I’m not the kind of guy that hangs out in my boxers with a bunch of fully-clothed people around.  I looked forward to the wetness of my shorts which were different from swim trunks in that they were made of cotton flannel. 

It wasn’t till the next day that I discovered that a seam of bog mud had goosed me during my swim, and that it remained lodged in my buttcrack until it was removed by force.  I won’t tell you the entire story, but a power sprayer may have ultimately become involved.

The whole event got me thinking.  This mud, you know, it was very thin.  It seemed to be quite a lot different from your typical mud, which stacks up on itself more densely.  This particular mud was less dense than your typical mud.  It made a very high stack on itself, like a house of cards, or the frosting they put on cakes at the supermarket.  At first, I thought the action of the lake must be enough to keep it constantly stirred up, but on consideration, I decided that the component sediments must themselves be undense.  That’s when I got really annoyed with English for not having a concise word already available that means “less dense.” 

It just got me that I can say hotter or colder, I can say higher or lower,  I can say baller or loser, but then I have to say denser or…less dense.  See? It’s unreasonable.  So I wondered what to do about it.  At first I set out to invent a perfect antonym for dense.  But then I got discouraged.  It’s not a very good way to go about it, you know?  I can’t just go around inventing words piecemeal, because then I have to spend half my time explaining the fuckers.  So what we really need, instead of a full-time vocabulary developer, is just a nice, tidy antonym that means “less [adjective]” and that’s way easier to explain.  We don’t have so many words that actually mean “less [anything],” and it would come in handy. 

I think –et would be a good one.  So then I could just say “this mud is denset than other mud I’ve experienced.” And leave it at that.  And just Reckon that when you want to say something is the “least [adjective]” you could say it’s the [adjective]ets one.  

I think the whole thing’s got a lot of potential.