Tomfoolery is a favorite.

Then there are those same shlemiels who habitually kibitz poor GazetteXtra shlamazels trying to express themselves.

JohnWickett, To answer your question. I used to live in Mt. Airy, NC. (the real Mayberry) and as you know in the South biscuits and gravy are a popular item on the food list for many. Women and men alike take pride in the way biscuits are home made and if you tell someone you had biscuits and gravy quite often they will ask you, "they weren't wompoms were they?" In other words, were they homemade and delicious or just those grocery store canister type? Nobody was ever impressed by a wompom.

njohnson - I liked the rhubarb reference. My grandfather once said it was also used in reference to airplanes flying so low over targets in WW1 that pilots could see rhubarb growing in gardens near homes. I wonder what other vegetables(weed-words) are similarly over used.
hg- Wompum was cute and interesting, where did you hear it used? Is it a derivation of or play on the word wampum which some of our ancestors used for small hard shells or snails which were used in bead work. I find these expressions most amusing. Some expressions, like ticket scalper, I find less entertaining.

Rusty, how about when some joker scrapes off the "c" and makes it "baby hanging station".

I like defenstrate. I always wondered how someone came up with that word-what was the need?

I have to laugh about "baby changing stations. I've yet to see anybody go in & come out with a different baby!

As Carl Childers said; "ya got any o' them french fried pataters mmmmhhhh.... how much ya 'ont fer 'em???"

Ed Gein

Living down south has really opened my eyes to different words in the English language. Things that now that I am back in the north, I get corrected for still using. Words like:

Wompums : These are frozen biscuits that you "womp" on the edge of the counter top to open the container.

Jeet? : Meaning, Did you eat?

Yanto? : Meaning Do you want to?

And I speck that ifin I was to look over yander into the other side of my brain, I could probly recolect a few more of those weird but useful words.

How about squze, as in she squze the heck out of that orange to make juice

no habla english

Honyacker: "A farmer or homesteader, usually one of central European background. b) A boorish and uncouth farmer, a lout, of foreign background. c) A farmer or homesteader who fenced open range. Somewhat ‘old-fashioned and often derogatory’ (as of 1991) [heard in Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming]"
Courtesy of Google

OK, all of you honyacker posters, get back to work!

Dustup. Fistacuffs. Rhubarb (a bench-clearing brawl in baseball).

I'll have to run this article "up the flagpole" at the next staff meeting. They may as well get the whole "kit n kaboodle".

Frank, "honyack" is considered a derogatory word, an ethnic slur, in our family, part of which emigrated to America from Hungary.
. . .
To our Hungarian friends it is tantamount to using the N-word toward people of color, calling an Irishman "mick", and so on.

Honyackers are commonly known in the Dakotas and eastern Montana. Large ranchers called the small town folks (townies) honyackers (chicken chasers). See Amazon -"Honyocker Dreams: Montana Memories", 2011 by David Mogen.

"schmutzy" can mean the same as South Milwaukee's "schmegly"...dirty stuff...as in "you've got schmeglys on your shirt".

sufficiently suffonsified

As a local honyock, I love the use and abuse of the "English" language. Was it the Scots or was it too much Scotch that was responsible for words like kerfuffle? It's great that there are so many spellings! But why all the hullabaloo over quirky words? I like the word SCHMALTZ because it conjures up images of a strong brew which should harken from the Milwaukee area. As a choir member, I know that the word can be used to imply sickeningly sweet music with too much "scooping". But the word carfuffle has the most interesting potential for wordsmiths of all stripes. Could it be a car with a loud rumbling muffler or one that looks like a marshmallow on wheels or even a pregnant roller skate? But enough said for now, the next time I hear and see a kafuffle fly over me I'll know enough to duck. How about you?

Yup, "schmutzy" comes from "schmutz," (rhymes with boots or puts, depending on who's speaking) a Yiddish word, as in, "you've got a little schmutz there on your cheek."
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Then there's schmaltz, which means chicken fat, but schmaltzy now describes something such as a song or movie that is sappy, overly sweet, saccharine.
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Gotta love Yiddish, which also gave us putz, schmuck and tchotchke, to name a few.
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If I remember high school German correctly, "schmutzig" or "shumtzig" is also German, meaning dirty.

One of my favorite go-to words is schmutzy.

Some dictionaries define it as dirty or grimy.

For me it works in several contexts: "You've got some schmutzy on you" which means a stain on a tie or a loose thread, for example.

It also works to indicate an emotional state: "He's getting all schmutzy about the situation."

I assume it is derived from Yiddish or German, but I do not know for certain.

I just love the sound of the word--schmutzy.

More pertinent here is to ask what this word does in this context. It seems to denigrate those who have legitimate concerns, just as women were once seen not as being "hysterical" when they voiced their own denigrating treatment.

Thank you, Northman. I gotta check my Chicago sources about honyock. I wonder if it derives from a pronunciation of "maniac" that I heard in Israel: MAHN-yahk.
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For all you who need to discuss the Walker-Barrett donnybrook, there are plenty of stories posted on the Gazette website where you can carry on that conversation. We're actually covering the two candidates during their visits in Janesville today (Wednesday). Thanks.
-- The Badger

Or you could use it as an adjective.

"Frisbeetarianism". It is the belief that when you die your soul goes up on the roof and gets stuck. Source of quote, George Carlin

I like and sometimes use willy nilly.

James Taranto, in his “Best of the Web Today” column on the Wall Street Journal opinion webpage, has been using “kerfuffle” for years. I suspect he deserves credit for reviving that one from the OED deathwatch.

I’ve always liked “fornisculate”, which “Dirt Bike Magazine” created about 40 years ago but never migrated into the mainstream. After doing a spectacularly destructive endo, a motorcycle’s remains could be described as “severely fornisculated”. Oddly, it’s a word you can use in speech and people will generally understand what you’re getting at.

Then there’s “honyock” (hahn-yäk), which you’ve probably never heard outside of Chicago. As a noun it can be a disparaging term for a clueless person (“what kind of hanyock puts ketchup on their hot dog?”), or you can use it as a verb (“whose hanyock idea was this, anyway?”) If you’re from Chicago, you can establish an instant kinship with anyone who understands this term.

Similarly, anyone who knows that when you call a person a “knob”, it’s short for “doorknob”, or “skid” as short for a skid row resident, is probably from Canada or at least spent some quality time there.

"Act 10" has been a phrase I've recently grown fond of. My dad would have found it a copacetic method of cutting one of the two wastrel political party's pursestrings.