Thursday, June 27, 2013

Waddle

waddle
verb, intransitive. To walk with short steps and a clumsy swaying motion.
noun, singular. A waddling gait.

Jack was so cantankerous, such a malcontent, that his friends felt sorry for the teachers and administrators at the school where Jack's son Dennis was enrolled in kindergarten. After dealing with his tantrums--Jack's, not the son's--for several years, which could be triggered by the most innocuous comment, they wondered if he would be able to control his temper when someone in authority at the school "insulted" Dennis.

Mike and his wife had inadvertently "insulted" every member of Jack's family at one time or another, and were so weary of verbally tiptoeing around him that they were in the process of ending their relationship with him, permanently.

"Can't you imagine?" Mike asked his wife one evening when they were preparing for bed. "Dennis is so accustomed to having his own way and being backed up by his father that it's inevitable that his teacher will have to discipline him. Then Jack will waddle down to the school so he can harangue her. Her and the principal, most likely."

"It's only a matter of time," she agreed. She smiled then, a small, almost satisfied smile at the thought of their soon-to-be-former friend hurling himself against the ramparts of the city school district. Bullying his wife and friends was one thing. She anticipated that he would get nowhere with the united front of the district administration.

Definitions adapted from The New Oxford American Dictionary, Oxford University Press, Inc., 2005 (eBook Edition, copyright 2008), and from Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam Company, Publishers, Springfield, Massachusetts, USA, 1965, depending on which is more convenient to hand.

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