poetry Nominative Determinism--A found poem*

Nominative determinism, explains poet Ellaraine Lockie about a certain president, is the hypothesis that people gravitate towards areas of work that fit their name.

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Nominative Determinism--A found poem*

By Elleraine Lockie

1. trump as verb: beat, break, checkmate, concoct, cook up, conceive, create,  crush, contrive, defeat, devise, distort, dominate, drub, excel, edge, fabricate, frame, fake, get the better of, get the upper hand, hatch, invent, make up, nose out, outfox, outdo, outmaneuver, overtake, outperform, outstrip, outwit, overcome, overpower, prevail, profit, scheme, surpass, top, trounce, vanquish, wallop, win

2. trumpery as noun: babble, balderdash, bits and pieces, blah, blather, bullshit,  bunk, bunkum, castaways, castoffs, chaff, claptrap, cultch, debris, detritus, discards, dominance, dreck, drivel, drool, falderal, foam, foolishness, froth, fudge, funk, garbage, gobbledegook, gibberish,  hogwash, horsefeathers, humbug, idiocy, Jabberwocky, jargon, jive, litter, leverage, malarkey, nonsense, odds and ends, poppycock, raff, refuse, rejects, remnants, riffraff, rubbish, rubble, swill, tatters, trash, trickery, tommyrot, twaddle, waste material, wealth, wreckage

3. trumpery as adjective: base, beggarly, brummagem, cheap, commonplace, flashy, foolish, gaudy, garish, inferior, insignificant, immaterial, little, mean, mediocre, meretricious, nasty, obscene, ostentatious, puny, pretentious, poor, rubbishy, schlock, scrubby, second-rate, shabby, shoddy, showy, slight, small, tawdry, trashy, trifling, trivial, two-bit, twopenny, unimportant, valueless, vulgar, worrisome, worthless, worst, wretched

4. trump up: color, conceal, disguise, falsity, garble, gloss over, hide, mislead, misstate, misrepresent, pervert, twist, warp

5. trump card: ace in the hole, card up one’s sleeve, leg up, secret advantage, secret weapon, upper hand, whip hand

*Collected from selected thesauri

This poem was first picked for publication by Lummox Anthology #9 due out in the Fall of 2020.

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Ellaraine Lockie is widely published as a poet, nonfiction author and essayist. Her fourteenth chapbook, Sex and Other Slapsticks, was recently released from Presa Press. Earlier collections have won Poetry Forum’s Chapbook Contest Prize, San Gabriel Valley Poetry Festival Chapbook Competition, Encircle Publications Chapbook Contest, Best Individual Poetry Collection Award from Purple Patch magazine in England, and The Aurorean’s Chapbook Choice Award. She also teaches writing workshops and serves as Poetry Editor for the lifestyles magazine, LILIPOH.