Personally, if you ask me (and, so far as I have heard, nobody has asked me yet, but I shall go right ahead just the same), I feel that we, as a nation (and when I say “as a nation” I mean “as a nation”) eat too much buttered toast.
Buttered toast is all right, provided neither of my little boys butters it (my two little boys seem to have an idea that butter grows on trees, when everybody knows that it is cut in great sheets by a butter-cutter [butter-cutter, butter-cutter where have you been?] whence it is shipped to the stamping room where it is stamped by large blonde ladies with their favorite initials and done up in bundles of twenty-five to be sent to the Tissue Paper Department for wrapping), but I do think, and I am sure you would think so, too, if you gave the thing a minute’s thought, that there is such a thing as overdoing buttered toast.
In the first place, you order breakfast. (By ordering breakfast, I mean that you get up out of bed, go into the kitchen in your bathrobe, cut three slices of whatever happens to be in the breadbox [usually cake], toast it, and butter it yourself.) The words “buttered toast” come naturally in any breakfast order. “Orange juice, two four-minute eggs, buttered toast, and coffee.” Buttered toast and coffee must be spoken together, otherwise you will hear from the State Department.
Here is where we make our big mistake. If, for once (or even twice), we could say “coffee” without adding “buttered toast,” it wouldn’t be so bad, but, as my old friend President James Buchanan, used to say (he was President more as a favor to Mrs. Buchanan than anything else), “You can’t eat your cake and eat it too.”