Butt-ending

Who uses it: Hockey players
What it means: Hitting another player with the end of your stick. It's a major penalty.
How you can use it: When you're shoving something in someone's face that does not belong there.

As many things as I've ranted about in this space, I believe that I have yet to discuss the terrible, long-played-out fashion trend of low-rise jeans.

Approximately five percent of the population looks good in low-rise jeans, and these would all be people between the ages of 17 and 25, with body fat percentages under 10%. I'll allow for the occasional exception, such as Angelina Jolie or Tod Goldberg's wife Wendy, but these people are not actually human, they're hot aliens sent from some distant planet to make the rest of us feel bad.

For most of us, low-rise jeans expose portions of the anatomy that were never intended to see the light of day, especially in a climate like Maine's. A term of art I considered using today is "muffin top," which is the roll of fat that hangs over the waistband of most low-rise jeans.

Muffin-tops, at least, are only mildly offensive. What really upsets me about low-rise jeans is the rear-view counterpart, which we could politely call the buttocks cleft.

This is a body part that I never want to see on anyone, not even on the most secret crush objects of my aging heart. I particularly do not want to see this when I am standing in line at the post office, as I was yesterday.

To be fair, the man probably wasn't wearing real low-rise jeans. The low rise came about through his choice to wear the jeans' waistband below his gut, rather than above. (It's a choice all men must come to, apparently, unless they want to do the radical thing and buy clothes that actually fit them.)

But I stood in line behind this man for more than half an hour, as he and his wife mailed packages around the world, and the man talked -- about everything and nothing -- that entire time, to his wife, to Jerry the Postmaster, and to everyone else around, including me.

All I could think about, during that stretch of time, was keeping my eyes away from that stretch of skin -- hard to do, because he was leaning forward, with his elbows on the post office counter, turning his head toward whomever he was talking to. I looked at the stamp display; I looked at the ceiling. I looked at the row of post-office boxes along the wall, and I looked at the postmistress loading tubs of mail into the dumbwaiter, behind the counter. I tried not to look at the man immediately behind me in line, because he knew exactly what I was doing, and thought it was hilarious.

"You can get a whole education, right here in line," he said.

"About something," I said.

Had it gone on one minute longer, I'd have lost it; I'd have had to say, "Stop talking... and for God's sake, pull up your pants."

Fortunately, that didn't happen. The man's wife is someone I often see in Curves -- and if I couldn't go back to Curves, and I'd humiliated myself in the post office, that would be the end of my community life in Gardiner.