Crisis Of Infinite Elves

Close your eyes and picture an elf. Is he tiny and pot-bellied, with a pointed hat and a wry smile? Or maybe he's unusually tall and slender, with Barbie doll hair and a permanent sneer? Amazingly enough, if you pictured either one of these you were right. If you pictured a large wooden object with branches and leaves, you were way off. You're thinking of a dwarf.

It's said that aloha has over a thousand meanings. If we don't act soon, elf might follow suit. In a few short years, "elf" might come to represent love, a fire extinguisher, the Atlantic Ocean, and blood. I don't have to tell you the sort of problems that would present to the Hemophiliac Kitchen Fire Prevention Honeymoon Cruise Line.

Clearly, something must be done to make sure that "elf" stands for one thing and one thing only. My proposal: Compare the two current meanings of the word, and force the lesser elf to adopt the new descriptor "narlp".

Pluses

+ Can perform real magic, like winking to summon unicorns on rollerskates made of rainbows, or twinkling their noses and shaking their butts to superheat the blood of their enemies into hemoglobic magma

+ Small stature keeps them from potentially dangerous situations such as roller coasters with signs that read "You must be this tall to ride" and sex

+ Constantly smiling, making the task of identifying their remains with dental records and family photos much easier

+ Don't need to rest, freeing them up to pursue their hobby of encircling sleeping humans' beds and watching silently

+ Capable of writing over 1,200 YouTube comments an hour

Drawbacks

- Speak too loudly when in nice restaurants, especially when making crude comments about minorities

- Refuse to get a job, favoring a string of ill-fated get-rich-quick schemes such as "We'll go to the hardware store and buy a bucket of nails for like five bucks, then go door to door in some rich neighborhood where no one knows how much anything costs and sell them for like a thousand bucks apiece."

- Can not grasp why baking cookies with multiple wood-burning ovens inside a tree all day is a bad idea, so they'll never lose all that weight

- Have opinions about the underlying themes in Fight Club, and would like to tell you about them in depth

- Can't shop at the Big & Tall clothes store without getting all sorts of weird looks

Pluses

+ They help the economy by singlehandedly keeping the hairbrush, shampoo and dog biscuit industries in business

+ Can live indefinitely, so there's a lot less pressure on their friends to pick them up from the airport on time

+ Thanks to their height and upturned noses, could theoretically be the first to smell a meteor and get everyone to dive out of the way

+ Great poker face will never reveal if they have a full house, a pair of 2s, or a poker chip lodged in their throat

+ Are essentially very tall 12 year olds with autism, but have the mysterious ability to make any girl swoon

Drawbacks

- Can perform David Blaine magic, like standing still for very long periods of time without showing human emotions

- Playing as one in a video game feels like guiding a marionette stick bug through the streets of Pamplona during the running of the bulls

- Can't draw cartoon porn for shit

- Fashion philosophy: If it's good enough for a community theatre production of Peter Pan, it's good enough for us

- Continue to insist that Hitler was right about shellfish

The winner, and sole representative of the word "elf":

Elves

– Dennis "Corin Tucker's Stalker" Farrell (@DennisFarrell)