I had occasion this morning to revisit something from my linguistics class this spring, and it almost choked me to death.

I’m 72, and while I’ve had a lot of kind of scary asthma attacks in my life, some of them involving laughter — such as when I was a kid and my uncle (who was only a few years older) wouldn’t stop tickling me, and I couldn’t stop laughing — I’d never had anything exactly like this happen.

I was finishing my coffee at the end of a late breakfast (I did some blogging last night well after watching the Red Sox destroy the White Sox), and made the mistake of calling up one of ISMO’s videos on YouTube.

He’s a Finnish comedian, and my linguistics prof introduced the class to him because so many of his jokes are about the English language. I think the one above was the first he showed us. Here’s another one I saw at about that time:

Those were funny, if you’re into words the way I am, but the one I encountered this morning was dangerous. I couldn’t tell it would be at first. ISMO was just kind of riffing about the many ways we use a word that I don’t allow on the blog, and then he said something that made me spew coffee all over the table (while trying to stop myself from doing so, which was probably a mistake), and then, for at least half a minute, my throat was so tightly closed (probably to keep the coffee out of my lungs) that I could not take in any air to replace that I had spewed. For several minutes after that, I couldn’t take in more than the merest sip of air.

It was scary, but I seem more or less OK now, aside from some lingering soreness in the middle of my chest — rawness in my esophagus, or bronchii, or something.

What was the specific line that did that to me? I can’t remember. My brain was so busy worrying about getting air that it couldn’t be bothered to store the memory.

I won’t give you the link unless you ask for it. Oh, it probably won’t harm you unless you’re as obsessed with language as I am, and most people are not. But I’m not taking chances. I don’t want my blog to become an attractive nuisance, in the legal sense.

But if you watch the above, milder jokes, and get interested enough to watch more, you’ll probably run across it. It’s about one four-letter word that English speakers use in many ways, some of them contradictory. If you see something answering that description, make sure you’re not eating or drinking anything…

I mean, this thing was weapons-grade, like in that Monty Python bit: