How Gaga's diction can help you win at Scrabble

One can learn any number of things when ennui leads to search engines. Claiming he discovered it in a bored moment at work searching results for diminutive words, a friend recently told me of his discovery of the continued online speculation about Lady Gaga’s gender.  I tried it and it works; if you type the word ‘if’ followed by a space, Google’s predictive guesswork throws up the top search as ‘Is Lady Gaga a Man?’ with over 41 million results.  The rumour started at last year’s Glastonbury, where a short red dress revealed something pink flapping about between Gaga’s thighs, although the Youtube footage displayed by www.ladygagaisaman.com and numerous others is too grainy to be conclusive.  With so many people apparently wondering, the question has been put to her on a couple of occasions.  Initially deadpanning that, ‘It's just a little bit of a penis and really doesn't interfere much with my life.’ she went onto say ‘I’m sexy, I’m hot. I have both a poon and a peener. Big f*cking deal.’  It’s at times like these that www.urbandictionary.com proves its worth. ‘Poon’ is the shortened version of poontang; ‘peener’ is the hybrid of penis and wiener. 

Urban dictionary can bring a whole new dimension to your Facebook Scrabble playing and there’s one word I’m hoping to get in the next time my boss’s back is turned. Big time US interviewer Barbara Walters asked Gaga if she was ‘part man, part woman’, a question that was interpreted by many online speculators as asking her if she was ‘intersexual’ (104 points on a triple word score if you’re wondering). The dictionary defines this as ‘being intermediate between male and female’. For the record, Gaga gave a definitive answer about her gender, a very definite ‘No’. Surprisingly for such an astute self-publicist, Gaga missed that opportunity to label herself as alien in the same sense as Ziggy Stardust, the alter-ego of her idol David Bowie. If people are speculating about you, why put a stop to the continuing free publicity by issuing a confirmation or a denial? Realising this, she backtracked a little by saying 'That's really quite a story! But in a sense, I portray myself in a very androgynous way, and I love androgyny.’ Despite having killed one rumour, the sheer number of the search results suggests ongoing interest, perhaps because one question remains unanswered.  What was that thing flapping around between her legs at Glasters?