SO, how was the break? Mine was highlighted by not one, not two but three enforced COVID-19 up-yer-nose tests, for no particular reason.

I was deflowered, so to speak, in a shipping container at a roadside testing facility at Tailem Bend on the way to Adelaide where a charming young woman took a retchworthy throat swab then inserted the same cotton tip deep into the nasal caverns of my cranium, where she spun the lot for three insanely itchy seconds.

Too much TV, but I thought they used two ends of a swab separately. However, on enquiry I have discovered mucus mixing is definitely de rigueur in the ACT, Victoria, NSW and Queensland… and SA. 

Driving untroubled across a veritable garden of green zones from Canberra and armed with the requisite “passport” that promised “unrestricted access to South Australia” whistling through the Pinnaroo checkpoint was going to be a breeze. Except it wasn’t. 

Under questioning by a plump policeman, I was told I was required to take a covid test on days one, five and 12. Why, the borders are open? “Because we don’t know where you’ve been,” he said. There was no direction to isolate until the inevitable negative results came back, just compliance would do.

“The coppers will be checking on you,” Constable Plod brightly threatened. No one did and I sullenly presented myself for the subsequent swabbing at drive-through testing points and complied with this abundance of not caution, but wasteful obsession.

There seemed to be no point to it, an observation confirmed by my never receiving results for tests two and three. Roll on the vaccine. 

ON a (much) lighter note, once again “The Washington Post” has published the winning submissions to its yearly “neologism” contest, in which readers are asked to supply alternative meanings for common words.

I can’t resist sharing the 16 winners: 

1. Coffee (n.), the person upon whom one coughs.
2. Flabbergasted (adj.), appalled over how much weight you have 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.), describes a condition in which you absentmindedly answer the door in your nightgown.
7. Lymph (v.), to walk with a lisp.
8. Gargoyle, olive-flavoured mouthwash.
9. Flatulence (n.), emergency vehicle that picks you up after you are 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, a Rastafarian proctologist.
14. Oyster (n.), a person who sprinkles his conversation with Yiddishisms.
15. Frisbeetarianism (n.), the belief that, when you die, your soul flies up on to the roof and gets stuck there.
16. Circumvent (n.), an opening in the front of boxer shorts worn by Jewish men.

AND while on words, Google’s most commonly misspelled word has been revealed as “diarrhoea”. Some people just can’t work it out, for which I have some sympathy; the word’s five vowels and a double “rr” stumped 122,000 Google users in the last month. 

Next was a personal favourite (that I can spell), “separate” (eluding 90,000 people) and in third place, “zucchini” (57,500).

Depressingly, the research found that only 28 per cent of people own a dictionary and 64 per cent of participants relied on technology such as Siri and Alexa to help them spell words.

The rest of the words on the list are: “Potato” (46,000 times wrong), “Questionnaire” (31,500), “Definitely” (13,100), “Embarrass” (13,000), “Conscience” (12,600), “Unnecessary” (9270), “Bureaucracy” (4770) and finally, another five-vowel challenger, “Manoeuvre” (750). 

Ian Meikle is the “CityNews” editor and can be heard weekly on the “CityNews Sunday Roast” on 2CC, 9am-noon.