Number 97
One of my favorite refrigerator magnets has a picture of a pup with a funnel collar and the last three lines of this bit of doggerel by Winston Churchill, whose wife called him Pug:
Oh, what is the matter with poor Puggy-wug
Pet him and kiss him and give him a hug.
Run and fetch him a suitable drug,
Wrap him up tenderly all in a rug,
That is the way to cure Puggy-wug.
I think all of us citizens are entitled to this sort of care after the election, but especially after the campaign.
Anyway, I would be the loyal opposition no matter who won. We can be thankful to have survived another bloodless transfer of power, and that only one person got killed after the Red Sox won.
The campaign provided little in the way of linguistic interest. A news guy said that Marvin Nicholson is Kerry's "body guy", that is, the person who knows and supplies all the little things Kerry likes to have. That would be a servant, a valet, except that the idea of a "servant" makes people squirmy. "Body guy" (or worse, bodyguy) sounds almost like bodyguard, way more cool than "personal assistant". Nothing wrong with having a servant if you can afford it. I figure I'm hiring a personal shopper, a cook, and a maid every time I eat at a restaurant.
Perhaps you've noticed a new spam format, in which the message appears to be a message-returned, mailing error report. The failed receiver is, of course, some address you've never heard of. For some reason I glanced at one of these, and at the end found that I'd received an immigration/green card spam poem, which follows (with the URLs deleted):
Work and Live in the USA
Special Report: USA IS GIVING AWAY 50,000 VISAS
Did you know: 85% of world population are eligible.
50,000 VISAS TO THE USA! Get it now.YOU JUST WONT A FREE GREENCARD!
Are you happy with your country?
Are you happy with your country?
Don't miss this! Live and Work in the USA!Are you happy with your country?
Work and Live in the USA
Re: Official US Goverment Program
Did you know? You can live and work in the USA
VISAS must mean permits to enter the country, not the credit card, although it's possible that someone is giving out credit cards with the visas and green cards.
By the way, my little French student wore a rubber Statue of Liberty crown with a flowing dress for Halloween. It's a truism that people love to hate the United States. They also hate to love us, but they do in spite of themselves. I think it has something to do with cards.
A new little restaurant in our neighborhood came and went in just a few months. I'm sure the cause of its early demise was its name: "Conscious Indulgence". The food was good, the proprietors were friendly, the prices were reasonable, the décor was attractive, the location was OK. The name was irritating. The sign wouldn't make you think it was a restaurant. "Hey, honey, let's have supper at Conscious Indulgence!" I don't think so. They should have called it Joe's or Jane's or something. I guess the name was supposed to simultaneously give the impression of virtue and health and awareness (i.e., your food consciousness will not be distressed) and pleasure (indulge yourself). Too much thinking, too much conflict in the name. A young woman I once knew had an idea for a restaurant she wanted to call something like "Guiltless Cafe", an all-fat-free restaurant. Bad idea. You automatically think of guilt.
Once I overheard a young man on a Boston subway talking to his companion (they were both dressed for business) say he wanted to work for a company named after its founder, because he thought that would demand some integrity and pride, whereas an impersonal or invented name is anonymous. He was wrong, though. I don't who Arthur Andersen was; maybe the founder of that notorious accounting firm is dead. Their Web site says Welcome but you can't get in. I did discover, however, that former Andersen employees have a Web site to help themselves find jobs, coyly called www.andersenalumni.net. Just a big old bunch of graduates looking for an honest day's work.
Dave Da Bee says, "Ironically [sic], today I laid hands on a magazine titled (I'm not making this up) Manure Manager." Wash your hands, Dave.
It's about time somebody stepped in to manage it.
I still regret not swiping a magazine called something like Vietnamese American Manicurist that I saw in a nail salon.
Dave Barry is taking a year off from his weekly humor column in the Miami Herald at the end of this year, and may or may not return. He says he's never missed a week in 30 years. He's made me laugh many times and I have to consciously try not to steal from him all the time. I think he ought to publish a collection of all his "Ask Mr. Language Person" columns.
One of his recent columns is just such a one, wherein he discusses the Starbucks style of naming cup sizes and answers made-up questions, such as, "What is the difference between 'advice' and 'advise'? Grammatorically, 'advice' is a platonic depradation used in exculpatory phrases."
Dave Barry is also responsible for my brief career as an ear candler. About ten years ago I chanced on a column of his about ear candles, an old folk remedy for cleaning the wax out of your ears. This had always been a problem for me, and more than once I'd had doctors force hot water into my ears to unplug them, so I was willing to try something new ~ as it turned out, switching from water to fire. An ear candle is a hollow, waxed, conical cotton tube that you stick in your ear and set aflame. There are various explanations of how this works, but the one that makes most sense to me is that the vacuum created in the tube by the fire sucks the wax out, which then either burns up or is sublimated into smoke. Dave said the FDA had confiscated hundreds, maybe thousands, of ear candles from a dealer, because the FDA hasn't approved them, although you can still usually buy them in health food stores. I ordered some from that supplier, whose address Dave had thoughtfully included. Dave himself tried them and said they worked, though he imagined the headlines if he set himself on fire: "Man dies in ear blaze; deserved to die, authorities say." They really did work, I could hear again, and I didn't die.
My sister-in-law Carol and I figured out how to make ear candles at home, and after word got around, for a while I sold them to a health store in Kansas. People also started asking me to do their ears for them. One neighbor didn't want to go to her doctor to have her ears flushed out because she knew he'd also tell her to stop smoking. I never charged for my services, but she gratefully gave me half a dozen bottles of homemade wine that someone had given her.
That part of my life is over now.
A few years ago when Dave Barry was in Boston promoting a new book, I stood in line at the bookstore to give him two of my best homemade ear candles in a wine bottle gift bag, along with a note of explanation and thanks. I'm sure he doesn't remember; he's probably received lots of ear candles from grateful readers.
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