Ian Murphy had been adjuring me incessantly to pen this commentary. Ab initio, I was unhorsed by his impertinence, this suggested cerebral deracination. “Isn’t your audience the American booboisie? Your tabloidism a rather zootrophic enterprise?” I queried him. “Is not The BEAST merely a form of intellectual dulosis?” I asked with arch incredulity. (I’m sure you’re laughing as hard I was.)

“Uh, I don’t…think so…” he replied.

My thick nullifidian rime unthawed, I simply glared at him. “I have enough trouble with my computer’s benighted, purblind spellchecker,” I told him. “It’s a murrain upon modern man. A pox on Gates’ head!” I screamed, the imprecation iterating loudly throughout my commodious athenaeum.

I avouch, though, erelong the proposed declivity intrigued me. Write for the hoi polloi? My cogitations and ratiocinations became febrile. Then again, I’m no thaumaturge! And this was an Augean, ultrafidian feat. I would have to become an abecedarian, a tyro of my own language all over again, reborn ab ovo. But funny side up? That was the question…

The very thought of breaching the tenebrous gloom—the dank, stygian depths of ignorance—gave me a frisson. I felt like one of Lovecraft’s demoniac explorers: pursuing his eldritch quarry only to discover, upon breaching its chthonic lair, that he was the prey all along. Worse yet, we weren’t talking about supernal beings, a thrilling foray into xenology. No, this was an anabasis into the empty head of the American troll: a decidedly terrene auntter. A valetudinary shudder came over me. What if the BEAST readership’s philistine cachexy were, in fact, loimic? What ullage of intellective ichor would I hemorrhage by this sanguisugent confederation? My weasand convulsed.

“I’m no joculator,” I cautioned Murphy. “I don’t go in for vaudevillian battology, inane prolixity, elocutionary gimcracks. Nor will I abase myself in the fetor of fundamental fetishism; koine of the keister; the cheeky succedaneum for high comedy in these topsy-turvy times,” I declaimed with a roguish rictus. “An arrant nostrum, don’t you agree?”

“Sure,” Murphy ventured, almost interrogatively.

“The coxcomb is not my strong suit,” I said, chuckling. He nodded dimly. “I’m no macrologist, of course,” I elaborated, sensing his unease. He proffered another shallow bow.

Needless to say, dubiety abided. I told Murphy I was utterly nescient of the demotic “form”: the patois of the American prosimian, if you will. I refused to adulterate my mandarin prose with proletariat shibboleths.

“I’ve heard about Uthman,” I hissed, referring to the redoubtable BEAST editor. Many a quidnunc related to me that Uthman’s procacicity had invited considerable calumny, and more than casual threats against his dentition. “I know all about his editorial proclivities: his tonsorial excesses, his excision mania.

“My poesy is a saliferous farrago, albeit with nary a soupcon of compromise,” I quipped, cacchinating indulgently, overcome at last by the concatenation of recherche japes. “I will brook no redactions! I’ll launch a stet offensive!” I railed, subderisorious.

“Right,” Murphy concurred faintly.

“You’re fastidiously laconic,” I observed. “Rigorously monosyllabic.”

“Look,” he fired back tetchily, “How long do you think it’s going to take to put a piece together? We’re on a deadline.”

“Don’t be so hasty, young jehu,” I counseled. “A daedal problem such as this requires deep intellection. Besides, what other recourse have you? You’re holding a yarborough, my friend.”

I won’t vouchsafe a transcript of the billingsgate—the irreligious scurrility—that poured forth from this scapegrace’s putrid maw. Suffice it to say his ululations were of the foulest sort, redounding exclusively to his own traducement: hoist on his own mephitic petard. (He osculates his mother with those labras?!) The odoriferous, excretory miasma proved a puissant excantation. I was jolted, as if from an oneiric terror.

I wonder now what I could have been thinking.

Well, it’s your loss, dear analphabetic reader. You won’t be privy to any more of my sesquipedalian bons mots, my hitherto irrepressible eleemosynary pedagogy. A more lachrymose state of affairs, I cannot easily recall. I’m comforted only by the thought you haven’t understood a word of this. Rejoice! Your ignorance is bliss.