by
Robert LaFrance
Sometimes two words are much too
much alike for comfort.
Take the word ‘breadpan’ – I do make
bread occasionally – and the word ‘bedpan’. I was seriously thinking of
relating the story of what happened to Flug’s nephew Allie, but I think we’ll
just leave that story until another day. It’s almost dinner time.
And that’s another thing (as I segue
as smooth as silk to another subject): What do we call the meals that we have
at noon and in the early evening? I usually call the noon meal dinner and the
evening meal supper, but some people, much classier than I, say the evening
meal is dinner. Then what do they call my dinner? Lunch?
In any case, it’s all academic (as
academics say) because my noon meal is not dinner in the first place; the
proper name for it is ‘late’ because certain retired persons have not cooked
it. Furthermore, she will not show me where the electric stove is kept or I
would be glad to cook it myself.
Speaking of electricity, I just
thought of another example of a pair of words that are uncomfortably close
together in sound if not in meaning. A convicted murderer in Texas was told by
the prison warden that he would be receiving ‘currency’ the next day. The
murderer, for some reason, thought the warden meant money, but the warden, not
an educated man, meant to say ‘current’. Texas still has the electric chair. At
dawn the next day the convicted murderer was shocked to find out that
‘currency’ had been a bit of a stretch, a malapropism as they say.
Perhaps the Texas chap was expecting
paper money, a load of $100 bills. We have all heard the fairy tale about ‘the
paperless society’ and by now we all know that it really is a fairy tale. In
the late 1980s, when computers had begun taking over everything, we kept
hearing that within a few years, perhaps even a decade, we would no longer use
or need paper to store correspondence and records.
Well, guess what? We use just as
much paper as we ever did, but now we keep 10,000 times more records, all
digitized – if that’s even a word. It is true I now email Aunt Martha instead
of using a stamp and envelope and sending it over time and space to her cottage
in Lake Huron country, but here’s the rub: I never did write her anyway, and
now we correspond every month. So I don’t use any less paper, but I now have an
electronic file of letters to and from her. Every few months, when I do a total
backup of my computer, I put all the information including her letters onto a
CD or DvD and store it in a safe place. So now I buy CDs or DvDs when before I
didn’t know either one existed. This is society’s new paper – those media
including travel drives, mobile hard drives, and all that stuff.
I don’t watch a whole lot of TV news
or listen to a lot of radio news, but one story I did hear recently was about
the world smallest pony, a 2-foot tall one, being stolen in Umbria, Italy. A
news reporter asked the pony’s owner who he thought had stolen the pony and demanded
a ransom for it. Now listen carefully to his answer: “Criminals.” Well,
Giovanni, thanks for clearing that up.
The Parti Quebecois minority
government in our neighbouring province appears to have shot themselves in the
foot when they proposed a new Charter of Values. Of course it was aimed at
Muslims, who don’t tend to be separatists, but it also hit another minority
whose feelings have been hurt. What about the atheists? Their feelings were not
considered at all when the PQ came up with their charter to fix a problem that
didn’t exist in the first place.
This news just in: About two months
ago Flug’s nephew Jerry G. joined the police force of a small town in PEI and
soon afterward got himself into trouble, as usual. Already famous for his lack
of judgment, Jerry forgot to do his homework and also forgot to think. On
August 7 a fire started in an apartment building just on the outskirts of that
small town of Murchieville and Flug, whose radio had not been turned on because
he was sleeping outside Tim Horton’s, saw a red truck zooming by and quickly
moved to arrest the driver. That driver was not only the mayor, but also the
fire chief on his way to the fire. Jerry’s job security took quite a hit that
day. He’s now settled into his new career as a ‘greeter’, if you know what I
mean.-end-
No comments:
Post a Comment