Visual Vocabulary: Tripe

Tripe: Lining of the stomach of a ruminant (especially a bovine) used as food; nonsensical talk or writing. As in, "What is this tripe they're serving down in lunch lady land? Sloppy joe, slop, sloppy joe..."

Ah, tripe. This is another one of those fantastic words with two definitions that are both fun to illustrate and I get to smash them together. My original idea was to illustrate just the "nonsense" meaning of tripe, mostly because I having so much fun looking up nonsense words and laughing at them (codswallop, clatfart, flapdoodle, jabberwock, malarkey, rannygazoo, the list goes on). But once again, Scott was being a stickler and telling me I should really go with the "cow stomach mystery meat" definition, since he felt that was the more well-known meaning for tripe. I immediately thought back to the days of buying school lunches and those nasty hamburgers that they used to serve—pink slime, they call it these days—and figured I could pair it with some good old fashioned lunch table tripe graffiti.

I was always a grilled cheese and tomato soup day lunch-buyer, and a fairly picky eater so I rarely bought lunch any other day. But for some reason I do remember encountering a "hamburger" at one point in my elementary school years; I'm pretty sure it was mostly oatmeal rolled in some raw meat juice and then probably cooked in a microwave. Then of course you had your mandatory watery, mushy, canned peas and the saving grace of every school lunch: tater tots. 

Visual Vocabulary is a project I created for myself in which I attempt to sear new words into my memory by illustrating them.