WOULD THAT THEY WERE

Have you ever found yourself halfway through a thought - a well reasoned, eloquently phrased gem of a bon mot - only to find yourself suddenly stunted in your narrative progress by the vagaries and caprice of grammatical chance?  If you are at all like me, you are very lucky.  You are also likely to have similarly suffered.  I speak today of words that are not words.

I pride myself on being a man of logic (unless of course logic isn't on my side, in which case I consider myself a man of passion, unless that isn't on my side either, in which case I consider myself a man of action, to wit: agree with me or I'll act upon your face) and if a logical progression leads me down a road, I expect language to follow along with me.  Sometimes, however, English decides that it isn't flexible, like a GPS that won't give you an alternate route (You know what, maybe I don't want to take the Belt Parkway, did you think of that smarty pants? Huh? Maybe I had a bad experience with it and would feel safer taking the BQE.  I'll bet youe little micro-chip didn't think of that did it TomTom. And really, why should I take advice from the only thing with a dumber name than BillyBob anyway. At least BillyBob's two different words, you just sound like your toaster parents were stutterers, or really indecisive.  We'll call him, Tom... Tom, yes definitely Tom, Tom it is.).  Anyway, my point is,  perhaps you find yourself telling a good story, and like any good storyteller, you want to make use of a rhetorical device or two, for example floating opposites. So you start your snide comment about your date the other night and you know you're going to nail the [gender neutral] for being a talkative bore so you start with "Well, [gender neutral] was overly chatty, but..." and just as your about to lower the boom, you realize that while English gave you "overly" it didn't see fit to bless you with it's antonym "underly". And so, instead of you being the sarcastic genius skewering your date, you're the kebab.

So yeah, that sucks.