Death to the Spit Take.

What is it with the 'Spit Take'? Everywhere I go on the internet at the moment, people claim to be expressing their amusement at each other's jokes by spitting liquid at their computer screens.

"Man, you made me spray milk through my nose! No, really! Really! Milk jettisoned out of my nose at membrane-rupturing speed, coating my keyboard and monitor with a goopy white film which now serves only as a reminder of your breathtaking wit. You owe me! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. You are AWESOME etc. etc..."

Now, let's get one thing out of the way for starters: I certainly hope that these people are actually drinking milk when this happens, and not just manufacturing it via a gland in their head. Because that, frankly, would be gross. People who have milk-glands in their heads can keep that particular genetic anomaly to themselves, thank-you-very-much, since my tolerance circuits are already at smoking point just trying to keep up with furries and Elijah Wood fanfic erotica. So while I'm sure that the ability to squirt milk into your breakfast cereal by massaging a sac in the roof of your mouth would come in handy (particularly while camping), I have no desire to know about it. Talk to the hand.

Anyhow, the Spit Take has become the new cream-pie-slapstick cliche. Perhaps it was once actually funny or original to say that laughing whilst drinking made you aerosolize your apple juice; perhaps occasionally it was even true. The fact of the matter is, however, that when someone claims to have "spit coffee all over my desk," I conclude that they are either:

a) Lying,

b) Prone to regurgitating soft-brained schoolyard funnies long milked dry of comedic potential. Doh! Don't have a cow, man - oh, and by the way, do I make you horny, baby?

or,

c) Incapable of properly ingesting fluid. Which actually is kind of funny, in a mean-spirited sort of way.

However, when I am Emperor, all this will be quite different. They will cower beneath me in the City Square as I issue my edict.

"NO MORE SPIT TAKES," I will roar, my orange hyper-colour robes incandescent with righteousness, and my bald, freshly-oiled pate gleaming in the royal afternoon sun.

Then I will sweep my sceptre through the air in my gnarled fist, for special emphasis. "NO MORE 'AWESOME'. AN END TO THE USE OF THE WORD 'AWESOME.' NOW PUNISHABLE BY DEATH!"

The crowd's ecstatic cheers will ring out like exploding shells, peals of black thunder, before falling silent beneath the intense gaze of my pale, beady, slightly watery eye.

I will fix them with this eye. Until they are affixed. With my eye.

"And NO MORE..." I will whisper into the hush.

"GODDAMNED..." I will hiss.
"...interrobangsssssssssssssssss."


And then that will be the end of the matter.