OK. I will take you at your word. I owe you one.John K. wrote: I have no intention other than to have a bit of fun.
As to your answering my friend's question about Geoffrey I will point out that I might be better qualified than you to answer because I have known him longer and we speak of each other as friends and so it might be more reasonable to lean in the direction that I am about to suggest. I think that Geoffrey can take a bit of kidding. I might be wrong but we will never know for sure until we try. So lets try to get him back for calling you "son of a viper"
To do so we are going to first have to figure out why he called you that. I don't think we will want to play if he was just being mean and that there is no joke in "son of a viper", so lets see if we can find a joke.
calling you a son is neither an insult or a joke because all us guys are sons of someone, so we will need to focus on the viper part. Now the viper can be a mother or a father but Geoffrey has used snake before when speaking of someone male and I don't think he would think of you as being that person's son and so I get the feeling that the viper that he says that you are the son of would be a female viper.
Has he ever met your actual mother? I doubt it and so I don't think he was trying to insult your mother. Someone in this or another thread recently said something about us sometimes being mothers to each other and maybe that has some merit. Here in Quebec we sometimes speak of the Catholic church being our mother and others speak of Mother Russia etc. Many indians have spoken of Queen Victoria being their mother and so you see maybe we can all have many mothers.
So maybe he was on one hand saying that he sees you as a son like all of us but that to him you were displaying specific traits that brought to mind some female viper. Maybe all of us have our own viper mother as one of our many mothers. It could even be that Geoffrey is not even disparaging that someone or something can appear like a viper. I saw that he once quoted "he might be a snake but he is our snake" in a very endearing way. Maybe he would even say "she might be a viper but she is our viper" in an endearing way.
If these things are so then the way he was making fun of you was suggesting that you were appearing as someone influenced by a viper. Maybe the way we could kid Geoffrey is by playing with the idea that maybe he is frightened by vipers or by calling him the son of something that you might think is influencing him.
Anyway those are just some ideas and maybe not even the least bit funny and that you should stick with calling people macaroons if it is getting you a lot of laughs. As you see I am not very good with this kidding business.