DIARY
Phony
fakes and other revelations
by
Robert LaFrance
Good morning, afternoon and evening.
Here are some major comments about this year’s occurrences. Make of them what
you will:
So many things are not as they
appear and so many words are mispronounced. Let’s look at the days of the week.
The one in the middle of every week, the one pronounced ‘Wensday’ or ‘Wensdee’
is an example of mispronounced words that we all utter. I am guilty as the rest
of the population, though I’m perfect in everything else. How about the day
before Sunday – Sair-dee? That’s how I usually pronounce it. And the second
month of the year – Febuary? Yeah, there are supposed to be two r’s there.
Last week I wanted to take a look at
some flooding – as long as it’s not around here – so I drove down to Majorville
whose name had often been mentioned on the radio news. I looked everywhere and
the closest I saw was a place called Maugerville.
In my never-ending quest for new and
interesting books, I ran across a German
one about a young (red-haired) girl who went to rural Bavaria to live
with an elderly couple there and help them on their farm. Perhaps you’ve heard
of ‘Anne of Green Goebbels’? It wasn’t until later that Flug, who knows about
these things, informed me that Joseph Goebbels was a Nazi murderer. Who knew?
I’m sure his employer wasn’t too pleased about that.
I am sure you have seen the recent
headlines about a criminal who stole thousands of dollars from a Widows and
Orphans Fund and then decided to give herself up to the police. People here
were puzzled when she went into the Colony Police detachment and took a shower
before confessing her felonies. Later on a reporter asked her about it and she
said she wanted to make a clean breast of it. She was a bit confused, what with
the cannabis sativa and all.
The Americans seem to be on every
newscast these days and I suppose that’s just a continuation of what has
occurred in the past century, when Canadian news media took the easy and cheap
way out and just reported on American stories, most of them bogus. Wyatt Earp
and John Wayne are both American Male Cow Manure. The point I am getting at is that so many things in Canada
retain their American names. Come on now: Canadians can’t bake beans? They have
to be baked in Boston? New York Style cheesecake can’t be that much different
than Minto cheesecake, and Idaho potatoes are just potatoes. It is to laugh and
be depressed. In fact, I think I’ll go out on the porch and sip on a Manhattan.
Do you watch any detective shows on
television? I watch a few, and in almost every show, the cop refers to a
suspect as the last person to see the dead guy alive. Nobody seems to consider
that only the murderer himself or herself can be the last one to see the victim
alive. In other words, that detective is getting a little ahead of himself or
herself.
Last evening I read that a certain
Shirley Gonereah had been named ‘A Fellow of Dartmouth College’ (here we go
again, in the USA) but than they realized she wasn’t a fellow at all, but a
person of the female persuasion. Isn’t it time that we fixed up that little
flaw in the English language? Come on, guys and gals, let’s put on our thinking
caps.
Two days ago someone in government,
and I’m not going to mention New Brunswick’s Minister of Something-or-other
Roger Melanson, referred to something as being ‘a new innovation’. In all my 69
years on this planet, I have never heard of an old innovation.
I may have asked this question –
like after every rain – but why do earthworms try to cross the roads and
streets after a rain? When I go out walking on or near our estate after a
multi-hour downpour, I find hundreds of the little worms on the road, and the
odd thing is, some are going to the left and some to the right. One day I
picked up a few dozen and put them in a nearby field, only to find them
returning ‘en masse’ back where they came from. You can’t help earthworms who
won’t help themselves, as my mother, looking right at me, used to say.
What is a tinderbox anyway?
A phrase that has been making the rounds
for the past decade or more is ‘unintended consequences’. This is a code phrase
for: “Wow! Did I ever screw up!”
Another
phrase we hear a lot, especially from government (non) communication staff
members is that something has ‘grown exponentially’. I can tell you now, that
person would not have been talking about my patience with bafflegab.-end-
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