In order to cast spells and enchantments in the role-playing collectable-card game Magic: The Gathering, you must have mana, a Polynesian term for psychic energy. But if you summon up too much mana, it burns you and costs you life points.

When running, likewise, after half an hour or so in warm weather my shirt gets sweat-soaked and often begins to scrape on a pair of vestigial, nonfunctional, but delicate decorative areas of the masculine chest. I have long sought for a prim and proper term to describe this painful problem, since my Victorian sensibilities inhibit me from saying the usual words for these anatomical structures. Today, while suffering during a slow jog around the neighborhood, I think I came up with the answer:

where MANA is an acronym for the unspeakable Male Areola & Nipple Abrasion ...

(cf. IntoWetAir (20 Apr 2004), ...)

TopicHumor - TopicRunning - TopicLanguage - 2005-07-24

(correlates: NothingHappens, OutOfSync, GeoMemory, ...)