Bobert, your description of what Goofus has been up to,

"What??? GfinS invent stuff that the insane one wishes you'd said, then attack you for saying something you never said and then prance around like a peacock doing some kinda insane victory lap???"

is both spot on and bloody brilliant!!

Goofus's little caper reminds me of a word I learned some years ago.

I had a very good friend (Gone now. Passed away a few years ago) who was of the Jewish persuasion. From him, I learned a whole repertoire of Jewish jokes. He taught them to me, and at parties would often ask me to tell one of them because I'm pretty good with accents and dialects and, oddly enough perhaps, he couldn't do a Jewish accent worth a damn.

Anyway, among other things, I learned a number of wonderful Yiddish words from him.

One of them was "chutzpah," (pronounced pretty much as it looks, except the "ch" at the beginning is pronounced like you're clearing your throat:   like the "ch" in "Johann Sebastian Bach").

Roughly, it means "gall" or "nerve," but of such monumental proportions that when people observe an example of it, they can't believe it because it's so extreme it defies all sense of decency and reasonable behavior. My friend said that it can only be defined by example.

Ex. 1.   A family of nine come into an expensive, plush restaurant just as rush hour is starting and commandeers a large table in the middle of the dining room. A waiter goes up, puts a glass of water in front of each member of the party, and starts to hand them menus. One older man, who appears to be the head of the family stops him, saying, "We won't need menus. Just the water. We've brought our own food." He then pulls out a picnic hamper and starts distributing the food therein.

The waiter, not believe the sheer gall of these people, reports the matter to the head waiter. The head waiter storms up to the table, prepared to order them out of the restaurant, when the head of the family looks at him angrily and shouts, "Waiter! Why is there no music!??"

Ex. 2.    A wild, psychopathic teen-ager murders his parents by setting fire to the house and burning them to death.

He then throws himself on the mercy of the court on the grounds that he is a homeless orphan.

I dunno. I think GoofuS ought to receive an Olympic medal for mental gymnastics (free-style), or perhaps a Pee-you-litzer Prize for sheer—well—chutzpah.

Don Firth