Dipsh!t

Once at a red light, which was a bummer because I was in a hurry, but not enough to blast through and risk my wallet, license, or life. Apparently, I had been driving like a skilled maniac and the person I had cut off pulled alongside me. I could tell there was some commotion behind his window because I caught a flurry of blurred frenzy from my peripheral vision. But I was preoccupied, listening to Steven Wright on the Comedy Channel on my satellite radio. I'm sirius. Finally, I had to look.

What really made him go crazy was that I was laughing at Steven and he thought I was laughing at him. The frenzy sublimated into a shit-fit.

And I know what a shit-fit is. I've suffered them myself. Many times.

With our windows rolled down in obligatory bilateral outrage, he said the word.

"You dipshit!"

Dipshit. Dipshit? I wondered.

We separated without road-rage homicide or wanton headlight destruction via a handy golf club. But I was wounded. Dipshit...me.

I asked myself, what exactly is a dipshit.

I looked it up. Oxford probably didn't have it, and I probably didn't have an Oxford dictionary, so I went to the slang sources on the Internet.

Dipshit: (dip'shit) A contemptible person.

Not good enough. I think he was going for something stronger than "a contemptible person." No, he was going for

...a contemptible person who is a piece of shit, dipped into a piece of shit, and if had a wooden leg, he'd be shit-on-a-stick--a shitsickle; ten pounds of shit in a five-pound bag; human detritus worth of nothing but flies--iridescent ones; the person no one wants to step into.

Amazing...the convoluted scatological point he was able to make with just a two-syllable compound word, a malodorous word, a contemptible word, like the person.

I resent that he called me a dipshit. I was NOT a dipshit when he called me that. But now I felt like one. He had nailed it.