The Floccinaucinihilipilisaurus

Gordon Ray was an utterly happy man. He'd just published his first book, 1,000 Great Pick Up Lines, and he was waiting for the checks to come in.

The reason Gordon was so pleased with himself was not because he took pride in his work—after all, he'd tried most of the pick up lines himself, and they'd all failed. Nor was he smug about the fact that he'd now be conning desperate male masses with bad pick up lines. No, Gordon felt so particularly spirited because he had at last triumphed over his former English teacher, Mr. Wiggins, who had once handed him back a paper marked "F" and disdainfully informed him that he would certainly never publish anything.

Today was the day that the book hit the shops. Gordon, in order to avoid recognition, had disguised himself in a pair of old jeans, a T-shirt, sunglasses, and a John Deere cap. He stood outside the front window of the most prestigious bookstore in his area before it opened and peered in, watching an employee unpack a box full of his books and stacking the shelf. When the doors opened a few minutes later, he went inside and hovered in the vicinity of the shelf on which his book rested. After a while, a young man with a yellow baseball cap and a vaguely furtive air picked up the book and thumbed through it. He purchased the book and left quickly. Gordon watched him leave, viewing him as though he were Galahad—until two young women approached. One of them, a nerdy-looking girl in glasses, saw the book and snickered. She picked it up and glanced through it, reading a couple of the pick up lines to her friend, a tall, portly girl. The pair laughed and exchanged a few derogatory remarks about the idiocy of the author and how no one would buy such a book. Gordon, crestfallen and resentful, decided to correct them on this matter. He stepped into view.

"Excuse me," he began, "could I have a word?"

"Oh, certainly," replied the girl in the glasses. "But why don't you have a look at this first? You might learn something." She handed him his own book. Giggling, she and her friend turned and walked away. The other girl called over her shoulder,

"Love the hat, by the way," at which both girls burst out laughing as they fled the store.

Gordon went home outraged. 'Oh, well,' he thought. 'As long as those two don't meet up with that guy in the yellow hat, I'll get at least one check.'

And indeed, the royalty checks soon began rolling in, and in his newfound wealth, Gordon quickly forgot about the two girls from the bookstore.

Meanwhile, in New Haven's Grove Street Cemetery, strange happenings were afoot. Noah Webster's grave, though guarded by a small fence, was discovered disturbed. Workers found that no one had removed anything, but the famed lexicographer's remains had in fact turned over. Nervously discarding superstition, they attributed this event to a storm that had passed through the area recently; a lightning bolt must have struck the metal fence.

That did not, however, explain the curiously shaped footprints leading away from the grave, nor could it explain the subsequent burglary of a local bookstore. Curiously, only a copy of Roget's Pocket Thesaurus was stolen. The police found no clues as to who had committed the crime and chalked it up to an extremely desperate student pulling an all-nighter.

The perpetrator of the crime was not a student, nor even a human. It was a monster—a fifteen-feet high, purple-and-green, scaly, Tyrannosaurus Rex-ish beast. It had arisen from Noah Webster's grave and followed the unmistakable aura of stupidity across the country to a generic high school somewhere in Texas. How the monster got there without attracting anyone's attention remains a mystery.

The creature certainly attracted a considerable amount of attention one morning when it stomped onto the high school campus, broke down the library doors with a mighty roar, stomped over to the "Periodicals" section, and devoured an airhead reading Seventeen. The creature then turned around, sniffed the air, and headed to the opposite end of the library. It leaned over a dork absorbed in a biography of Nikola Tesla, lowered its head, opened its mouth, and made a rumbling sound and a hiss. The dork, frozen in terror, gazed up at the monster in mute astonishment—his jaw dropping when the beast proclaimed, in a low, rumbling voice,

"I am the Floccinaucinihilipilisaurus." The young man remained silent. "I feed on people in possession of inadequate vocabularies."

"Ah," replied the adolescent, named Aron, in an even greater state of discomfort than when Brian Hurley had placed him in a double jock-lock—until, that is, he spied Brian Hurley himself at the opposite end of the library. Then, in an inspired flash, he confidently addressed the monster: "Well, you've come to the right place. Brian Hurley over there, who's reading Sports Illustrated instead of doing his science homework, is an excellent candidate."

"Ah," responded the Floccinaucinihilipilisaurus, "I am obligated to reciprocate your perceptiveness. Your percipience, my callow acquaintance, will indubitably be remunerated subsequently." Aron vaguely understood this to mean, "Thanks; see you later, pal," put his book down, rested his chin in his hands, and watched with peaceful satisfaction as the beast swallowed his foe whole.

Then another youth, a friend of Aron's called Justin, arrived on the scene.

"What's going on?" he inquired, indicating the carnage with a casual jerk of his head.

"I don't know. Some monster's eating all the stupid people."

"Oh, cool," Justin remarked, plopping his engineering manuals on the table. "Who's he got so far?"

"Some ditz and Brian Hurley."

"And it looks like Adam Bryer's about to get it, too."

"I wish Lauren were here to see this," Aron commented. "She hates dumb jocks. She'd get a kick out of this. Pity she doesn't believe in school libraries, though."

"Hey, guys," came a familiar voice.

"Speak of the devil," chorused the boys.

"What're you doing here?" asked Aron. "I thought you hated school libraries."

"Oh, I do. But my stupid English teacher's forcing us to use the library for our research papers."

"I hate that," Aron remarked.

"Are you doing The Catcher in the Rye again?" queried Justin, calmly watching the monster corner a cheerleader.

"Yep," Lauren answered. "Same as last year. And the year before. And I'm sure I'll do it next year, too. I'd do something different, but they give us the same crappy reading list every year, and The Catcher in the Rye's inevitably the only good thing on it. So I figure I can just do essentially the same report every year, blow it off, and do some real reading instead."

"What're you really reading?" asked Aron.

"Kim; Rudyard Kipling. Kim's a guy, actually."

"Interesting twist."

"Yeah. Speaking of interesting, what's going on here?" Lauren asked, seeming to notice the devastation for the first time.

"Some monster's eating stupid people," Justin told her.

"Cool. Who's he got so far?"

"Uh . . . some ditz, Brian Hurley, Adam Bryer, and B.J. Bailey."

"Damn it!" shrieked Lauren. "Why'd I have to miss that? I hated that bitch!"

"Hey, don't worry about it," Aron reassured her. "There are plenty of oth— Oh! Oh my God, look!" Lauren spun around just in time to see the monster consume Donald Hoy.

"HA!" Lauren cheered triumphantly. "YES! Hurrah for the . . . uh, monster! Um, what is that thing, anyway?"

"It told me it was called the Floccinaucinihilipilisaurus," Aron replied. Lauren blinked.

"I'm surprised you could remember all that."

"Believe me, I was too shocked not to pay attention. . . . I wonder what it means?"

"Dunno. Let's look it up," Lauren decided, and the trio walked over to the dictionary stand. It was open to the page that had "fuck" on it, which Lauren ignored. She flipped over a few pages. "Hmm," she mused, "seems like the closest we can come is 'floccinaucinihilipilification,' meaning, 'the estimation of something as valueless.' Huh. Don't see how that really connects . . . ."

"It told me it eats people with inadequate vocabularies," Aron informed her.

"Hmm. Well, that'll do it. . . . So, seeing as how some primordial sesquipedaliomaniac is rampaging around the school and eating people left and right, I'm guessing we won't have classes today."

"I'm guessing so, too," Justin added.

"Nothing else to do. Wanna watch?" Aron suggested.

"Sure," the other two answered, and the trio sat at a table and looked on as the Floccinaucinihilipilisaurus ran amuck and ate a few more small-vocabularied folk, cheering occasionally.

After a little while, Lauren noticed something.

"What's that under its arm?"

"Looks like a book," Aron theorized. Justin squinted and informed them,

"It's Roget's Pocket Thesaurus."

"Ha! Perfect!" exclaimed Lauren. "Oh, look! It's swatting Jason Johnson with it!" GULP. "Was swatting," she corrected herself, quieting down when the beast bellowed at its next victim,

"WHAT?!"

"I said, 'put me down,' you . . . big, ugly . . . thing!"

"PATHETIC!" roared the monster. "Can't even manage a 'release me, you oversized, unprepossessing zoophyte!'"

"What?" shrieked the girl.

"An utter waste of humanity!" the Floccinaucinihilipilisaurus shouted. "Had you used another appellation in lieu of that pitiful 'thing,' I might have spared you! But now—"—and with that, he swallowed her whole.

Then the beast strode outside, tearing the library doors off their hinges in the process. Aron, Justin, and Lauren watched it go, looked at each other, stood up, and followed it.

The Floccinaucinihilipilisaurus crashed down the streets, inducing many a panicked wail and traffic accident. Then the creature turned and stopped in front of a bookstore in a mall. Much as when it had first met Aron, it lowered its head, growled, and hissed—and then punched through the large glass window and stormed inside.

The trio of dorks paused at a safe distance, exchanged glances, and entered the book store, hanging back a little and finally hiding behind a sofa, peering over the top. They watched as the employees and first customers of the day rushed to the back of the store, terrified and screaming. The Floccinaucinihilipilisaurus looked down at the crowd, leered, licked his chops, and growled:

"Who shall be my preliminary course?" At that precise moment, a teenaged girl walked past the mall-side entrance of the store babbling into a cel phone.

"Oh my God," she shrieked, "I could not believe her! I was all, 'Oh my God, you didn't,' and she was like, 'Oh yes I did, and—" then the monster ate her.

"I love that thing," Lauren proclaimed. "Ooo! Look! Over there! A gaggle of schoolgirls going to the bathroom together! I bet anything the monster gets them, too!"

"Me, too," agreed Justin.

"And—I concur also."

"What?!" Justin and Lauren asked together.

"I was just thinking," explained Aron, "if this monster eats people with small vocabularies, we better make sure it doesn't get us. I mean, consume us."

"Devour us," Justin supplied.

"Gormandize us," from Lauren, was met with blank stares. She just shrugged. "Something I used in a paper once." Justin looked less surprised.

"Still a screwy word, though." He paused contemplatively and continued, "See, that's just the problem with people today. They're afraid of sounding intelligent. You use a slightly unusual word, and people look at you like you're nuts, and you get defensive. Everyone resorts to being content with sounding stupid, the least common denominator."

"Yeah," Aron agreed. Justin continued,

"Point is, people should be afraid of sounding stupid, but instead, it's just the opposite."

"People—I mean, stupid people—act afraid of smart people," Lauren observed.

"They are," Aron claimed. "They're afraid because smart people can use their intellect against them."

"I hate to discontinue this fascinating philosophical conversation," Justin interrupted, "but I believe we're about to be—er—pleasantly diverted. . . . Entertained," he shrugged at their bemused expressions.

The trio looked toward the bathroom door as the four girls emerged.

"Ohmigod Jessica!" one squealed.

"What?" another shrieked.

"Look at that—thing!"

"Ohmigod what is it?!" the other two wailed. Then a flurry of small-worded exclamations of panic burst forth.

"It's— it's a monster!"

"Ohmigod!"

"Oh no; what do we do?"

"We need help!"

"Your feeble grasp on our mother tongue is your sole principle requiring assistance," quoth the Floccinaucinihilipilisaurus, looming over one girl.

"Huh?" she stammered.

"Perhaps you might benefit somewhat from the perusal of this abecedarian categorization of our tongue!" bellowed the beast, snatching up a nearby copy of Webster's unabridged dictionary and flinging it at her. She screamed and ducked.

"Deplorable," growled the irate zoophyte. "I feel felicitous upon contemplation of your upcoming velocitous extramuralization from your feeble-minded existence!" And with that, he devoured her, taking three bites instead of merely gulping her in one piece, as he had with everyone else.

"Wow," muttered Justin, "guess she was really stupid."

"No kidding," agreed Aron. To Lauren—"Did you see her fake tan?"

"How could I have missed it? It almost baked my brain, too," she griped.

"I was more distracted wondering if all the bleach in her hair would poison the monster," Justin put in. They were interrupted by the beast's next comment, spoken to one of the remaining girls:

"Your demotic intercourse betrays your asinine conception, as well."

"I— what? I've never done that—I don't do that—weird sex stuff!"

"Oh, God," Lauren muttered. Aron and Justin snickered. The monster did not seem pleased. He towered over the girl.

"Your confidantes have evinced that they expend their days committing atrocious verbicide also. How might you surrejoin yourselves?" The two exchanged nervous glances. One began,

"I—uh, don't do that stuff either."

"Fools!" boomed the monster. "Your ultimate solar sojourn is upon you and you contemplate merely improprietous carnal acts?!" And with a delightfully satisfying chomp-chomp sound, they were both gone.

"What's going on here?" came a voice from the other end of the bookstore that Lauren vaguely recognized.

"Oh my God," she whispered to Aron and Justin. "It's that guy I told you about. The one with the John Deere hat."

"Oh, God," groaned Aron.

"Just what we need," agreed Justin. "Hardly my idea of a savior."

"YOU!" roared the Floccinaucinihilipilisaurus. "MY ARCH-NEMESIS! EVIL ONE! EPITOMÉ OF OPPROBRIOUSNESS! YOU OF THE FEEBLEST VERBIAGE OF ALL I HAVE OBSERVED!!!"

"Woah," chorused the trio.

"I'm guessing this doesn't bode well for John Deere there," Justin commented.

"Probably not," Aron agreed. "I wonder what the monster has against him?"

"Maybe he has an exceptionally small vocab— ooo, look!" Justin interrupted himself as the monster began to speak.

"Gordon Ray," the zoophyte pronounced solemnly, "prepare yourself for floccinaucinihilipilification."

"Er . . . " stammered Gordon helplessly.

"Should we shout 'you're going to die, dickhead' at him?" whispered Justin.

"No," Aron replied. "Then he might escape."

"Oh, yeah."

"You," the Floccinaucinihilipilisaurus continued to the hapless Gordon, "with your penurious application of our Anglo-Saxon phraseology, have provoked Noah Webster's corpse to wax vertiginous in his tumulus, instituting my creation." Gordon stared, uncomprehending. "With your ludicrous tome, 1,000 Great Pick Up Lines, you have antagonized me appallingly."

"Er . . . how?" Gordon began to get a glimmer of what the monster meant.

"Your ludicrous, lamentable title, as an exemplification. The ridiculous, trite, not to mention overabundant monosyllabic syntactic structure, 'great.'" (Here the irate animal snorted with considerable disgust.) "Even a word as compendious and cant as 'surefire' might have sufficed, but NO!"

"What kind of word is 'surefire?'" snorted Gordon sarcastically.

"It is," snarled the monster with an alarming lick of his chops, "casual yet definite, just like the illicit sex you're attempting to guarantee, you hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobic TWIT!"—and with that, the Floccinaucinihilipilisaurus snapped him up and swallowed him.

Justin, Aron, and Lauren looked at each other, relieved.

"I thought that would never happen," sighed Justin contentedly.

"Funny hating him that much, considering we've never even met him," Aron commented. Lauren sneered at him. "Well, so you were that unfortunate. Heh." Lauren rolled her eyes.

"What's happening?" The trio looked over their shoulders to see a confused, horror-stricken bookstore employee.

"Some monster's eating people with small vocabularies," Justin explained to her. She gasped.

"How are we going to stop it?" Justin, Aron, and Lauren exchanged guilty glances. "You mean you haven't even tried?" The three looked at her and shrugged with a collective,

"How?"

"Well—think about it! There must be something!" Again, the three just shrugged, and the girl stomped off huffily. They watched as she entered a door marked "employees only" and emerged with a middle-aged man, apparently the manager.

"I wonder where he's been all this time," Aron remarked off-handedly, watching as the manager frantically rushed after the Floccinaucinihilipilisaurus, shouting at it to stop kicking down shelves in the romance section.

"Probably looking at porn," Justin answered, unwittingly truthfully. The beast pivoted on a purple-and-green heel, lowered its head until it was at eye-level with the manager, paused for a split second, opened its jaws wide, and released an ear-splitting roar. The manager froze in place, quaking in his argyle socks. The monster snorted, satisfied, and recommenced his destructive labors. He reached the magazine rack, lifted it, and heaved it through the store's other large window, the one he had not shattered with his entrance. Then he arrived at the mystery section. He sniffed at the shelves, and, to the eyes of the trio behind the sofa, pulled some apparently arbitrary books off the shelves and systematically began ripping the pages out.

Having regained his powers of speech, the desperate manager rushed up behind the Floccinaucinihilipilisaurus and wailed,

"Stop! Stop! You haven't paid for those!" Without so much as a backward glance, the monster apathetically swung his tail, and with a THWACK!, the man flew backwards across the store and crash-landed in the women's self-help section. The monster showed no other reaction whatsoever.

Meanwhile, Aron, Justin, and Lauren watched as the bookstore employee who'd spoken to them earlier paced nervously up and down with her hands behind her back.

"She'll wear out the carpet," Aron commented.

"Shouldn't take long. It's cheap enough," Justin replied.

"It's certainly uncomfortable enough," groused Lauren, repositioning herself for at least the twentieth time.

"Stop fidgeting!" snapped Aron. Lauren glared at him. Before she could retort, the Floccinaucinihilipilisaurus reached the teen section of the bookstore, piquing their collective interest. The three behind the sofa half-expected to see him pick and choose certain books to de-page again, but this time, he used his surprisingly dexterous short front arms to sweep all the books off the shelves into a heap on the floor. Then he punted the two empty bookcases across the store, directly—and probably deliberately, though seemingly unawares—into the awakening manager. Then to the trio's surprise, the monster stood over the pile of books on the floor, lifted his leg, and urinated. The three dorks giggled at first, but quickly ceased when the distressingly large puddle began seeping across the floor in their direction. Aron and Justin squealed like girls and huddled closer together. Lauren remained silent and stood up, huffing at them,

"Oh, for God's sake; you two are ridiculous. Come on." The guys looked at each other sheepishly and stood up.

"Now what do we do?" asked Justin.

"Ew!" shouted Aron. "It's on my sock! Run!" All three screamed and fled, running smack into the pacing employee, domino style—Justin ran into her, Aron ran into Justin, and Lauren ran into Aron. (She had years of klutziness behind her, though, so she managed to strategically bounce away from the contaminated sock.)

"Oh," the startled employee began. "Have you three come up with a plan?"

"Plan? Erm, well, no, not exactly," stammered Aron.

"What do you mean?"

"Um, well, we were just running away—I mean, I got some—monster pee on my sock—"

"Ugh, gross!"

"Yeah, I—"

"Shut up and listen. I think I've got something." The trio, sufficiently impressed, stood still—at least, Justin and Lauren did. Aron kept fidgeting and shifting around, trying to escape his warm, moist sock, yet obviously not wanting to touch it. "I think," the employee began, ignoring Aron, "that the monster may be killed with small words." Ever-logical Justin looked dubious.

"How's that possible? It feeds on people with small vocabularies."

"That's just it," chirped the bookstore employee. "It feeds on them because it has to eat them before their short words kill it."

"Oh!" chorused the trio.

"So, I think if we hide ourselves behind a stack of dictionaries or something and shout short words at it, we might—"

"What's this we business?" Justin demanded.

"What? You mean you won't—"

"No," the three interrupted simultaneously.

"But we'd be happy to watch from outside," Justin added unhelpfully. The employee placed her hands on her hips, indignant.

"What?! Now, wait just a min—"—but at that precise moment, the Floccinaucinihilipilisaurus raised its head high and roared, stomping several yards closer to them, silencing the employee. The trio took the opportunity to flee, Aron's wet sock and shoe making thoroughly disgusting slap-slap noises on the floor as they ran. They skidded to a stop on the mall-side entrance to the store, but Aron's wet sock and shoe caused him slip and fall, knocking over Lauren in the process. Justin started to point and laugh, but then he slipped and fell, too. The three now pee-covered dorks stood up and dusted themselves off with disgusted expressions. Aron moaned,

"Worst. Bonding experience. Ever."

"Ha ha, dork, it was your fault," grumbled Justin.

"Guys, shut up. Look," Lauren told them. They looked into the store and watched as the employee who'd effectively chased them away stacked dictionaries into a sort of barricade. The manager of the store hovered uselessly around.

"That—thing!" he babbled. "Where did it—come from? What is it?"

"I don't know," the employee replied, "but I think I can stop it. I just need to finish this pile, and then I can get started."

"What are you going to do?"

"I'm going to shout short words at it." The manager laughed, mocking,

"What good will that do?"

"It's obvious!" snapped the girl. "Look at what it has under its arm." The manager looked accordingly and squinted, unable to make it out. He took a few steps closer and read,

"Rodgitt's Pocket Thesaurus." Aron, Lauren, and Justin collectively winced and slapped themselves on their foreheads. The Floccinaucinihilipilisaurus, incensed, bellowed down at the manager,

"IT'S RO-ZHAY'S, YOU PILLOCK!" and proceeded to chomp down on the manager, consuming him with great relish. The three pee-soaked nerds outside heaved huge sighs of relief. Then they watched as the employee finished her wall of dictionaries and thesauri. Standing behind it, she yelled out,

"Hey! You! Monster!" The Floccinaucinihilipilisaurus glared down, sneering. He edged closer but also, upon seeing the books, remained at a safe distance, much like a hungry but timid bird. Nervously, the employee began. "Ahem. Big! Small! Like!" The monster began to appear increasingly agitated, inching forward and then retreating.

"NO!" he shouted, stamping furiously. "DESIST!"

"Said! Cool!" The monster roared in vain. "Uh . . . guy! Girl! Um . . . Good! Bad!" The beast began to look ill. He moaned. Taking heart, the employee continued. "A lot! Too! Uh . . . so! Go! All!" The monster began to look a little blurry around the edges. Unfortunately, the bookstore employee seemed at a standstill and paused. The Floccinaucinihilipilisaurus began to pick itself up, gnashing its teeth in a most alarming manner. "Get!" shouted his enemy. "Have to!" He began dissolving again. She paused in thought for a moment. A fly flew in front of her face. "Bug! Thing!" The monster began to melt away. "NICE!" shouted the girl triumphantly, and everyone cheered as the monster melted, Wicked Witch of the West-style, into a hideous, musty-old-dictionary-smelling, purple-and-green puddle.

The other employees of the bookstore, along with a few customers who'd been hiding, came out to cheer for the girl.

"Yea!" they cried. "Good for you!" At this, there were rumblings of,

"Mmph—try 'congratulations!'" from the purple-and-green puddle on the floor, and the Floccinaucinihilipilisaurus roared to life again and ate the people who'd just spoken. The bookstore employee, still wisely hidden behind her stack of lexicographical tomes, shouted,

"VERY!!!"—and with that, the monster spontaneously vanished in a puff of smoke.

Aron, Justin, and Lauren looked at each other, shrugged, and walked home. The bookstore employees and customers rejoiced, their troubles over.

Until the monster's cousin, the Grammarosaurus, came along.