My Virtual Reading Room

or

Look, Ma, what I got!
            ~~~~~~

The more I leaf through the dictionary in my physician's waiting room the more my ego grows;
I feel rather like the man who was delighted to find that all his life he had been speaking prose,
Because I discover that my modest minor ailments,
Why, when expressed in scientific terminology, they are major physical derailments.

What I thought were merely little old mumps and measles turn out to have been parotitis and rubella,
And chicken pox, that's for the birds, have I told you about my impressive varicella?
I apologize for my past solecisms, which were heinous,
Never again shall I mention flat feet or bunions when referring to the hallus valgus or my pes planus.

It projects me into a state of hypnosis
To reflect that a watched pot never boils, it furunculosis.
Once my internal rumblings at parties caused me to wish I could shrink to nothing, or at least a pygmy,
But now I proudly inquire, Can everybody hear my borborygmi?

My one ambition is to become as rich as Croesus.
So that instead of this bourgeois backache I can afford some spondylolisthesis,
Although then I suppose I would look back on my impecunious days with acute nostalgia
Because my headaches would also have progressed from rags to riches, or from Horatio Alger to cephalalgia.

I have certainly increased my learning by more than a smidgin,
Now I know that that specifically projecting Hollywood starlet is not a squab, she's a steatopigeon.
Indeed, I know so much that it would be truly tragic were I to be afflicted with aphasia,
And if you can't swallow that statement it is my diagnosis that you are suffering from achalasia.

(Ogden Nash)