(I didn’t have to make hardly anything up here. Yep, about 95 percent of this is true. Big Jim still has the scars to prove it.)

I am, as any fool can see, a professional word monger. Rather than make my living in an honorable fashion, I have taken the twisted and rather disreputable path of manhandling the English language and passing it on to an unsuspecting public for a livelihood.

This has its benefits, prime among them being the avoidance of physical labor and the ability to fabricate facts and stats to meet the need. But the words, ah yes, the words. They are another thing entirely.

One must be able to use, abuse, fold, spindle or mutilate a staggering variety of words in order to get a point across.

This leads to an almost morbid fascination with words and their usages. It also makes me sit around a great deal and ponder the sources of the words. You know … where they come from and all that. It makes people assume that you are a real deep thinker as you sit back, cigar in mouth, gazing off into the distance. Which, in the most roundabout manner possible, brings us to the subject of this particular “From the Saddle.”

Some background is in order.

I have a friend by the name of Andy Poole. You might recall him from his tire-hawking days and his numerous exploits in countless lurid crashes, some of them pictured over the years in these very pages. I also have another friend, my riding partner, Big Jim, a largish carpenter with the disposition of a puff adder with dysentery. Both of these distinguished gentlemen ride in the Vets class, and both do quite well, depending on where they ride. In the mud, Poole is a missile. On a fast, sandy track, Big Jim usually wins his class.

However, when you put them together on the same track, odd things happen. Let me clarify.

It all started a few years back when Big Jim and Andy Poole accompanied the DB trailriding team on the Barstow to Vegas trailride. At about the halfway mark of the 175-mile trek, there’s a huge, dry lake bed, about seven miles wide and nine miles long. It’s as flat as stale beer and not a twig, stick or stone is on the surface.

It was on this wide, safe expanse that Andy Poole decided to cut through a cloud of dust and T­boned Big Jim at 90 miles per hour. Poole went down and Jim did tank slappers for the next two miles trying to recover. Miraculously, he was uninjured, while Poole broke his wrist. The knobby tracks on the side of Big Jim’s tank and leathers made for excellent horror stories later on.

Poole moved out to the West Coast and started racing the Vets class with us on a regular basis. And, on a regular basis, started to run into Big Jim and crash him out, until it became a running joke in the pits.

On no less than 20 different occasions Poole blasted Jim off the track from every conceivable angle. Side hits, rear-end rams, vicious lane changes … every gruesome injury producer in the books.

Jim started to get a nervous tic whenever Andy showed up on the starting line. Andy would invariably line up right next to Jim, making his eyes roll back in his head and his bad knee start to tremble. Even if he moved to the other end of the starting gate, Poole would somehow manage to take him out before a few laps had gone by, but more often than not, on the way to the first turn. Things were getting ugly.

Last Saturday, we were all at Saddleback Park for a basic motocross. Jim and Poole were making jokes about all the crashes. Those of us who knew better made mental notes to avoid these two at all cost.

In the first moto, nothing much transpired, and we thought the jinx was broken. However, in the second moto, Poole darted across the track while Big Jim was trying to pass him, and he took the poor man out in a staggeringly brutal end-over-end crash. Andy, of course, did not even fall off the bike, even though traffic stopped behind him for two laps out of sheer, stark terror.

Two laps later, Poole crashed all by himself and had ambulance attendants reaching for rosaries and lighting a bank of candles.

As they helped Big Jim get back to the pits and counted his body parts to see if they were all there, someone was heard to comment: “He got pooled real bad over on the front straight.”

Later that day, there was another horrible crash and a spectator noted, “Yup. That guy on the Honda pooled someone in the corner and caused the pileup.

A new word was born into the English language. From now on, it will not be necessary to say something like, “That guy went bananas and crashed everyone out.” No. All you’ll have to say is, “He was pooled severely.” People will know and shake their heads in sympathy.

So, for the scholars in our audience, I offer this entry for the newest edition of Webster’s book:

poole (pool) verb 1. to crash noisily and violently into another, to smash, to damage with great force 2. to force through with loud crashing 3. to inflict great bodily harm upon another 4. to take out a rider unknowingly, but with great harm 5. to break into pieces by crashes 6. to perform tank slappers upon others in your class. —noun (Ex.: He did a poole./That was a terrible poole.)

Thus are words created. The staff of Dirt Bike is proud and somewhat awed to introduce a fresh word into the English language. This gives us incentive to break new ground in journalism, rather than printing the same old hunky, month after month.