So when you utter a cliche, you're saying something that is so unoriginal that there's actually a prepared mold to represent it. And when you unjustly "stereotype" a person or race, what you're really doing is "forging them onto a French printing press plate." You monster.

What it means:

That thing you do where part of your soul escapes through your nose.

What the hell is it supposed to sound like?

A person sneezing. Imagine that.

Huh?

You're an Anglo-Saxon. It's the eighth century. You have swords and ships and mead and like, no regard for the sanctity of consonants. If somebody sneezed, how would you transcribe the sound?

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Fjord?

You have to use an "S" or two in the word, sure, but otherwise -- fuck it. You're a damn Viking. Somebody's gonna correct your spelling? Do something crazy. Put some "F"s in there. Yeah, like, right next to some "N"s. Just to see if anybody says anything, so you can bash their face in for it.

That's how we got the early words "fneosan" and "fnese."

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"Fneosan! What? SAY SOMETHING, BITCH."

Unfortunately, history's pansies won out in the end and messed up one of language's greatest onomatopoeias. On early Old English manuscripts, an "F" looked very similar to an "S," and since the "FN" phoneme was too balls-in-your-eye awesome for the average reader, they assumed that "fneosan" and "fnese" were "sneosan" and "snese." Eventually, the word modernized, and became the present-day "sneeze."

And now nobody's face gets bashed in at all.

We call this progress?

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Society went to hell as soon as people stopped carrying axes on a daily basis.

What it means:

To express amusement vocally. Hopefully you are familiar with this term, otherwise you likely find this article every bit as confusing as you do infuriating.

What the hell is it supposed to sound like?

A person actually laughing. Like this: "What a good joke you have just told: I too disrespect the Nordic peoples! Laughlaughlaugh."

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Apparently "NORDIC" is the sound your hand makes when striking someone's sarcastic little face.

Huh?

Around the fifth century, early Europeans used the word "hlaehhan" to indicate laughter. It was pure and logical onomatopoeia: Crash some Old English throat abuse into the nasally intoned "ha ha" from The Simpsons' Nelson Muntz, and you've got a pretty good idea what early European merriment sounded like. But the word went through so many abbreviations and modernizations over the years -- mostly to remove all the superfluous letters and to not sound quite so much like Fran Drescher being put in a choke hold -- that its modern form, "laugh," is now practically unrecognizable.

Later in 1720, the Scots found themselves in a similar predicament, when the modern "laugh" onomatopoeia didn't quite capture the spirit of a hearty Scottish chortle. To remedy this problem, they created the word guffaw, and were quickly and brutally subjugated by the English for their grammatical heresy.

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Oh look, there's even a chart to depict the joyful act of laug -- arrgh kill it!

What it means:

A fuzzy and/or wuzzy insect. Possibly named Christopher the Bee.

What the hell is it supposed to sound like?

Buzzing.

Huh?

Before it became known as the bumblebee, nature's Augustus Gloop was referred to as either the humblebee or the dumbledor, because of its modest nature and wizardly powers (?). In the early 1500s, a poet decided to mix things up and use the Middle English word "bombyll" in his poem, because mo-fo's back in the 1-5s straight didn't give a f...olly. But in actuality, all three of these prefixes -- "humble," "dumble" and "bombyll" -- were attempting to imitate the buzz of a bee.

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This is all a trick by the bees to make them sound adorable.

For those wondering why J.K. Rowling decided to name a main character in the Harry Potter novels after an archaic word for bumblebee, she once explained she "imagined him walking around humming to himself a lot." She settled on "Dumbledor" because "Professor Whackjob" was a little unflattering, and "Professor Hummingbird" apparently made him sound like too much of a hippie.

Huh?

Ping-Pong originated in Victorian England in the late 1800s, but it wasn't called Ping-Pong back then. It was called table tennis or lawn tennis, and it was played almost exclusively as a parlor game by people rich enough to know what a parlor is. The paddles weren't solid blocks of wood, like today; they were made of parchment stretched across frames, kind of like mini drums. Because various types of parchment and frame shapes lent each paddle a different sound, several onomatopoeias sprouted up: "Whiff-waff," "pom-pom," "pim-pam," and of course "ping-pong." Ping-Pong -- along with table tennis -- became the preferred name for the sport, presumably once people grew tired of the spontaneous and impromptu beatings that occurred every time the phrase "Fancy a round of pim-pam?" was spoken aloud.

One more time, for posterity: Poop.

Hehe.

What it means:

A nocturnal bird. It eats mice, it doesn't have a neck, its head does that creepy Exorcist swivel thing? You know, it's like an ... it's like an owl, man. Dang. Describing things in abstract is hard.

What the hell is it supposed to sound like?

The hoot of said owl.

Huh?

This is another case of a word slowly losing its imitative origins through shortening and modernization. "Owl" originally comes from the Pre-Germanic word "uwwa," which was indeed pretty close to an owl's cry.

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It also sounds like it's slightly hungover, and we do claim to be experts in this field.

Cool. We're on board. Count us in.

But then some Old English asshole came along and added a suffix for no good reason, giving us the word "uwwalon," because he just had to show everybody how much more suave and articulate his bird noises were. Through abbreviation and phonetic spelling, we eventually wound up with the modern "owl," which doesn't sound like an owl at all.

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It sounds like a dying giraffe. No, no, remember: Experts.

If you do spot a nocturnal predator and it says "Owl, owl, owl," just turn and run as fast as you can. That is a criminal with poor impersonation skills trying to fool you.