Today is DUMB day here in Maine. No, that doesn’t mean I’m going to be DUMB today but all things being considered I might be DUMB tomorrow. This word is used almost as heavily as “shit” and “fuck”. One bad move and you are immediately labeled a “DUMB shit” or a “DUMB fuck”. You may have only made a minor mistake but you’re still painted with a broad brush that identifies you as someone who screwed up in a big way. Our language is not fair and not for the faint of heart. Have you ever heard the term “dumbassary” or how about “shitheadedness”? You can build your own words and introduce them into the lexicon and pray that someone repeats them, that they then catch on, and all of a sudden you’ve been immortalized. People everywhere use the word DUMB and some even attempt to make money from its use. Here are few examples . . .

• A 1998 song by the group “Garbage” was named DUMB.

• Another group of fine upstanding musicians called “The 411” used it as a song title way back in 2004.

• And probably one of the more famous weird bands, “Nirvana”, sang their hearts out in their 1993 In Utero album to the song DUMB. Later found to be highly prophetic when Kurt Cobain, the lead singer, offed himself with a shotgun. And lucky us because of that incident the magical title of celebrity was passed onto the band “Hole” and introduced us to Courtney Love. Really, how DUMB was that?

As flexible as the word DUMB is, the language has also supplied us with dozens of words with DUMB as the underlying meaning. If you hear any of the following words used in describing you in any fashion, the speaker is in fact, calling you a DUMB ass.

cretinous, feebleminded, simpleminded; boobish, foolish, idiotic, imbecile, moronic; ignorant, illiterate, lowbrow, uneducated, uninformed, unintellectual, and untaught, unthinking; absurd, asinine, balmy, cockeyed, crackpot, crazy, cuckoo, daffy, daft, dippy, fool, half-baked, harebrained, insane, kooky, loony, lunatic, mad, nonsensical, nutty, preposterous, sappy, screwball, silly, unwise, wacky, zany; fallacious, illogical, invalid, irrational, unreasonable, and last but not least, STUPID.

So when I state that I am anti-stupid you can see just how busy I’ve really become. It’s an endless battle identifying and pointing out all of the stupid, dumb, and idiotic citizens roaming our streets right under our noses. Fortunately for all of you, I grudgingly volunteered years ago to lead the charge against DUMB and STUPID.

YOUR WELCOME