ERIFF ballot (due Mon., Nov. 20)

[eLLioTT morEton]

Fictioneers!

Here are the candidates for ERIFF.  You get a 1-point and a 2-point vote, 
to bestow as you please, except they can't both go to the same def.  If 
you get as many points as you give to the real def, plus all points given 
to your def.  (I.e., we're doing this one as we have done since time 
immemorial.)

Ties will be broken in favor of defs which attract comments, verse, ASCII 
art, or other distinctions, from persons not their authors.

Votes are due at 5 p.m. EST on Monday, November 20.

em

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eriff (n.) -- The dried skin and pulp of the coffee cherry that is removed 
from coffee beans in processing.

ERIFF (abbrev.) -- An acronym, standing for "Eat Regularly In Four Foods", 
developed in 1928 as part of a public awareness campaign by the Food, 
Drug, and Insecticide Administration to encourage consumption of meat, 
dairy, grains, and vegetables.  From the original brochure: "You'll be 
spiff, you'll be teriff, if you always ERIFF."

eriff (n.) -- A mixture of ground peach pits and poultry bones, formerly
used with limited success as a fertilizer for cotton planting.

eriff (adj.) -- Glorious overabundance even to the point of waste; the
mixed emotion of reveling in abundance with concern or guilt over the
excess.
     "The cellar being eriff after our harvest, we ate well with 
little worry for the winter" - Jacobsen, "Ten Years in the North", 1881.
     "I am all but eriff at your generosity, and do not know whether I 
can accept" - from a letter from Alice B. Toklas to Vera Lachaise, 1949.

eriff (n.) -- An underwater embankment, man-made.

eriff (n.) -- 1.  A canary-bird two years old.  2.  A rogue just 
initiated.  (Etymology unknown.)

ERIFF (n.) -- Desert dust embedded in glacial ice. NOAA researcher Dr. 
Carolyn Wender quotes social critic Arthur Friedman, who inspired her 
current project: "When icebergs have on occasion been towed by ship to 
equatorial regions to provide iced treats for the well-to-do, there have 
been found patches of eriff embedded in the ice rendering it unfit for use 
as a bed for caviar or in drinks.  However, such "riffery" was certainly 
good enough for use in crank freezers for iced creams and sherbets."  
Wender now examines the eriff in icebergs calving from ever-older sections 
of glacier, analyzing it for mineral content and pollen, and has a new 
analysis of the changing wind patterns over the Atlantic ocean which have 
carried Saharan dust to Greenland.  (Scientific American, September 1984, 
p. 77)

eriff (n.) -- A breed of goat from Albania and Macedonia.

eriff (n.) -- Truncheon; nightstick.

eriff (n.) -- 1. (Old English) a combat between two berserkers.  2. 
(Middle English) a brawl.

eriff (n.) -- The sundown crepuscular period.

eriff (n.) -- A drumming sequence of four measures of four beats each,
characterized by emphasis on the second beat.  Variations using quarter, 
eighth, and sixteenth notes are frequent.
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Linda offers the following joke definition:

eriff, joke, a constable type in Flaggstaff, AZ, was embarrassed by
the first two letters in "Sheriff", once she had had a sex-change
operation, so she/he had the "SH" removed from her/his badge and
other credentials.

while Fran opines nonseriously:

Well duh, in Jazz, that's when you riff in the key of E.

But of course these can't be right.  They're too preposterous.