My momma told me not to talk with my mouth full. Sometimes it takes an object lesson to drive a point home.

My ever delightful husband took me out to get pastries in the early hours of a Saturday morning. That right there is enough to make a gal fall in love with a man. As we munched our muffins, I gazed across the table at him. He’s such a handsome man!

Suddenly washed with a warm feeling of admiration, I muttered (around a mouthful of food), “You’re a hunk, you know it?”

He looked at me with the most quizzical expression on his face, as I grabbed my coffee cup.

Wrinkling his nose in distaste he said,

Coffee was spewed.

I get it, Momma.

I got an e-mail from a friend of mine. She sent me the results of the Washington Post’s Mensa Invitational which once again asked readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply a new definition.

“Mensa.” Isn’t that an organization for really smart people? She would belong to that. My husband says there is a lesser known organization for the rest of us, called “Densa.”

Anyway, I thought it was funny (it cracked us up, anyway) and that you should see the winners:

1. Cashtration (n.): The act of buying a house, which renders the subject financially impotent for an indefinite period of time.
2. Ignoranus: A person who’s both stupid and an asshole.
3. Intaxication: Euphoria at getting a tax refund, which lasts until you realize it was your money to start with.
4. Reintarnation: Coming back to life as a hillbilly.
5. Bozone ( n.): The substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas from penetrating. The bozone layer, unfortunately, shows little sign of breaking down in the near future.
6. Foreploy: Any misrepresentation about yourself for the purpose of getting laid.
7. Giraffiti: Vandalism spray-painted very, very high.
8. Sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn’t get it.
9. Inoculatte: To take coffee intravenously when you are running late.
10. Osteopornosis: A degenerate disease. (This one got extra credit.)
11. Karmageddon: It’s like, when everybody is sending off all these really bad vibes, right? And then, like, the Earth explodes and it’s like, a serious bummer.
12. Decafalon (n): The grueling event of getting through the day consuming only things that are good for you.
13. Glibido: All talk and no action.
14. Dopeler Effect: The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.
15. Arachnoleptic Fit (n): The frantic dance performed just after you’ve accidentally walked through a spider web.
16. Beelzebug (n): Satan in the form of a mosquito, that gets into your bedroom at three in the morning and cannot be cast out.
17. Caterpallor (n): The color you turn after finding half a worm in the fruit you’re eating.

The Washington Post has also published the winning submissions to its yearly contest, in which readers are asked to supply alternate meanings for common words. And the winners are:

1. Coffee, n. The person upon whom one coughs.
2. Flabbergasted, adj. Appalled by discovering how much weight one has gained.
3. Abdicate, v. To give up all hope of ever having a flat stomach.
4. Esplanade, v. To attempt an explanation while drunk.
5. Willy-nilly, adj. Impotent.
6. Negligent, adj. Absentmindedly answering the door when wearing only a nightgown.
7. Lymph, v. To walk with a lisp.
8. Gargoyle, n. Olive-flavored mouthwash.
9. Flatulence, n . Emergency vehicle that picks up someone who has been run over by a steamroller.
10. Balderdash, n. A rapidly receding hairline.
11. Testicle, n. A humorous question on an exam.
12. Rectitude, n. The formal, dignified bearing adopted by proctologists.
13. Pokemon, n. A Rastafarian proctologist.
14. Oyster, n. A person who sprinkles his conversation with yiddishisms.
15. Frisbeetarianism, n. The belief that, after death, the soul flies up onto the roof and gets stuck there.
16. Circumvent. An opening in the front of boxer shorts worn by Jewish men.

Somehow I missed this back in 2002. Researchers in England collected more than 40,000 jokes and put them on the internet for some testing. How did they do that? Well, people from all over the world rated these jokes with a “Giggleometer,” with five-point scale ranging from “not very funny” to “very funny”. The data was collected and those scientists determined the funniest joke in the world. Ahem.

During the course of their research, they “discovered” that people from different nationalities have different ideas of what is funny. Well, duh! I could have told them that, if they had just asked me! I’ve tried to watch “humorous” British sit coms before. I wonder how much they spent for all this research?

They discovered that Germans will laugh at anything. People from the UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand seem to prefer “wordplay.” In France, Belgium, and Denmark they like “surreal humor.” Unfortunately, their research showed that Americans and Canadians “preferred jokes where there was a strong sense of superiority — either because a character looks stupid or is made to look stupid by someone else.”

The head psychologist in the project was Dr. Richard Wiseman. Who wouldn’t trust a man with that name? He said, “we find jokes funny for lots of different reasons. They sometimes make us feel superior to others, reduce the emotional impact of anxiety-provoking situations or surprise us because of some kind of incongruity.”

The following joke had elements of all three. Though some jokes were considered funnier by certain groups, this joke appealed to all ages and nationalities and to both men and women.

Here is “The World’s Funniest Joke.”

Two hunters are out in the woods when one of them collapses. He doesn’t seem to be breathing and his eyes are glazed. The other guy takes out his phone and calls the emergency services.

Back on the phone, the guy says: “OK, now what?”