Lessons Learned

   It’s been a year since Jim married Bridget. In a very short time, my son who I thought would never make the transition from bachelor to husband, found a nice girl and became a step-father to her two children, Tyler and Samantha. Tyler, in his early teens, has a mind like a computer and plans everything he says and does with NASA-like precision. This quality may make him seem like a nerd at his tender age but it will take him far when he decides to marry.

   Shortly after their wedding, Jim and Bridget were invited to a party close to where they lived. It was adults only and my daughter who lives a few miles away offered to take the kids for the night. As they were getting into the car, Jim observed, “You know, if we didn’t have to drop off the kids, we could just walk to the party.” To any man, this is a harmless logistical statement of fact. If he’d said it to another man, the response would be, “Duh.” What Jim didn’t realize was that he’d just verbally left solid ground and stepped onto a metaphorical straw mat covering a hole filled with sharpened punji sticks.  

   Bridget exploded. “Maybe we should just get rid of the kids,” she screamed.

   They never went to the party.

   My son, who’d lived alone or with male roommates for most of the prior ten years, and could fearlessly say anything he wanted without fear of retribution, was unschooled in the nuances of talking to women—especially one he was married to. The lessons began that night.

   It’s been my personal observation and that of my married friends, when our wives aren’t around, that something changes when a woman marries. That sweet fun-loving girl becomes a ruthless, calculating, cold-hearted linguistic sentinel on the lookout for something sinister in anything her husband might have the temerity to utter. Maybe it’s a defense mechanism, but a woman parses everything her man says, seeking any subtlety in tone or phrase that might be a knock against her.

   For example, he says, “You look nice today. Instantly she thinks, “Is he saying I looked bad yesterday?” Then she lets him have it. He learns to drop any qualifying words that might be taken the wrong way. “Safety First” becomes the rule for saying anything to her.

   I learned a different lesson early on. My wife asked one day if I would like steak or chicken for supper. When I responded in favor of steak, she asked why I didn’t like her chicken. I tried to explain that there was nothing wrong with her chicken; I just preferred steak on that particular evening. She countered by telling me she’d already made the chicken. Things escalated when I asked her why she’d given me a choice when she’d made my decision for me. After a brief discussion that brought the neighbors to their windows, we ate our chicken in icy stillness. That was the night I learned to embrace the silent treatment.

   When my son and I used to be in business together, we discussed these issues in depth. I explained to him that he must think before he speaks. He must look for anything in his upcoming utterance that could be used against him in the court of marital bliss, where he stands accused and she is judge, jury, and executioner. When in doubt, I say, grunts and monosyllables are as safe as can be. However, there are times when questions must be answered and he must be cautious to a fault to avoid saying something that might be turned around to bite him in the ass.

    That being said, there is a question that every married man should never, ever, answer. No, it’s not the “do I look fat in this?” query. My thinking is that if she thinks she looks fat in something, she probably does. “Uh-uh” is always a safe bet here. The unanswerable question is, “If I died, would you remarry?” These six simple words are a trap. There is no correct answer.

    If you answer in the negative, she’ll get all upset and claim you hate being married to her. If you say you would get married again, she’ll ask, “Who is she?”

   I took a solemn oath from my father that he took from his father and so on back into the antiquity of husbanddom. I swore that I would avoid that question at all costs. I have passed the oath on to my son but it will probably end with him. Tyler, I’m sure, is already working on the answer. 

What's In a Name?

   As I was looking up some esoteric word in my dog-eared copy of Mr. Roget’s thesaurus I noticed in the back of the book a list of names associated with groups of animals. Among them were a shrewdness of apes, a sloth of bears, and a business of ferrets. Going online I found many more, like a mob of emus, a lap of cod, and a trip of dotterel, which are European and Asian plovers. I didn’t know that either.

   Who came up with these strange names? Is it possible that a clandestine group commissioned by the government could have brought us something like this? Let’s step back into the murky past and see what one of these commissions might have been like.

   The scene is a meeting room in late 18^th-century Philadelphia. Afternoon sun is filtering through the open windows. The fledgling nation is doing all it can to distance itself from its former British masters, and a group of founding fathers is reconvening after lunch. Chairman Dick Shunary brings down his gavel to resume the proceedings.

   “Gentlemen, as you take your seats, I’ll remind you of the morning’s results of this Commission on Giving Weird Names to Groups of Animals, a sub-committee of the Congressional Council for Obfuscation of the British Language and Turning It into Something Purely American.

   “We began by finishing yesterday’s work on primates by naming a group of baboons a congress. A congress of baboons indeed. I’m sure our leaders will appreciate that. We can only hope it doesn’t come true in the future.”

   Howls of derisive laughter filled the room as the gavel sounds again. If only they knew.

   “As we finished with primates we turned our attention to the sky to work on groups of birds and came up with a pitying of turtledoves, a watch of nightingales, a rafter of turkeys, an unkindness of ravens, a charm of goldfinches, and a gaggle of geese. That’s a good morning’s work, gentlemen. I hope we can be as productive this afternoon. First on the agenda is hawks.”

   Llewellyn Wordsworth, the delegate from Boston yelled, “Kettle!”

   “Very good, Mr. Wordsworth,” the chairman replied, “very good indeed”.

   “No, Mr. Chairman, the tea kettle in the hearth behind you, it’s boiling. I was actually thinking of a haven of hawks--for the alliteration, don’t you know.”

   “Another excellent choice, Wordsworth, but I already wrote down kettle, even though I was saving that word for fish. Perhaps we’ll come up with a fine use for kettle of fish somewhere else. A kettle of hawks it is. Crows is next. Does anyone have an…”

   “Murder!” The shout came from a dark corner in the back of the room. “Murder, I say!”

   Instantly, the chairman's gavel sounded and the room returned to order as he demanded to know the identity of the interloper.

   Into the light stepped Noah Webster who was working on the first American dictionary. Though not a delegate he was nonetheless a familiar figure in this chamber. He had been protesting this commission since its founding. “I apologize for another outburst, Mr. Chairman, but I could hold my tongue no longer. Gentlemen, as you well know, I’m trying to write a dictionary of the American language, a language you are murdering with these ridiculous definitions. With every wreck of this bird or prickle of that rodent I have to edit and edit again. I’ve rewritten my book three times. At this rate I won’t get it done until 1828 already. Can’t we just say a bunch of crows or a group of crows or even just some crows and be done with it?”

   The chairman had had enough. “Screw your dictionary, Mr. Webster. I’ve a good mind to use this gavel upside your head. A bunch of crows? That’s the silliest thing I’ve ever heard. You’ve interrupted these proceedings for the last time. Bailiff, remove Mr. Webster and make sure he stays out.”

   As he was being shown the door, Webster shouted, “You are murdering the language. It’s murder, I say. Murder.”

   “I’ll give you murder,” yelled the chairman. “I’ll…hmm, yes, yes I will. I’ll give you murder, Mr. Webster. A murder of crows, that is. That should confuse generations to come and they’ll have none other than Noah Webster the great lexicographer to blame. Next item: sheldrakes.”

   A group of sheldrakes, a species of Old World duck, went on to become a doading. And so the commission met until every group of animal got its moniker. Some were named alliteratively, like a wisdom of wombats. Other groups were connected with what they do, e.g. an intrusion of cockroaches or a mischief of mice. When all else failed, the commission invented words, as in a nide of pheasants or a chine of polecats.

   Per his prediction, Noah Webster, after a multitude of revisions, finally published his master work, An American Dictionary of the English Language, in 1828. The commission never did bestow the chairman’s gavel upside his head.

   Did it really happen this way? No one knows. Maybe it sounds silly but no sillier than a clowder of cats or a rhumba of rattlesnakes or a fever of stingrays.


For a complete list of animal collective nouns  http://www.thealmightyguru.com/Pointless/AnimalGroups.html

  

   

Shut Up and Eat!

   In the middle ‘70s, my in-laws lived on a farm near Wild Rose, Wisconsin. They acquired this piece of paradise on a visit to a relative when one of the locals, after having too many rounds of Point Beer, offered them the farm--80 acres and a house--for $8000. They pounced before he could sober up.

   The house was in sorry shape but it was still a bargain. They rented the tillable acreage to a local farmer and split the profits with him. The income covered the property taxes and paid for the repairs to the house. My in-laws drove up every Friday after work in Chicago and spent all day Saturday and part of Sunday getting the place in shape. They came back Sunday night in time to grab some sleep and go to work on Monday.

   For most people this is a four-and-half-hour trip but it took them more than eight. My mother-in-law had to stop at the Hinsdale, O’Hare, and Belvidere Oases on the Tollway, the Wisconsin tourist center at the state line, and the Union 76 truck stop outside Madison to get her fill of coffee, relieve herself of coffee, or both. Usually both. How she made the final hour without a coffee break or a pit stop no one knows. This weekly ritual took the better part of a year, but once the house was habitable they quit their jobs and moved in permanently. My wife missed her parents so we made the trip often, sometimes coming back the same day. We never stopped for coffee.

   We never knew who might be on the farm at any given time but the core group was us and our two girls, the wife’s older sister and her husband, and her younger sister and boyfriend du jour. Other relatives and friends filtered in and out at random.

   The farmhouse was small and sleeping arrangements were up for grabs. The lucky ones got a bed in the tiny upstairs bedroom, others grabbed a couch or a rolled up in a sleeping bag on the living room floor. Some camped in the yard or racked in one of the sheds or the barn.

   Whenever we left for the farm there was the inevitable question: Will Joe be there? Joe was my brother-in-law’s father. A more miserable man I have yet to meet. Even with all his millions nothing made him happy--especially food. No matter what culinary delight was put in front of him, he’d complain in his gravelly voice, “It’s got too much goddam this, or not enough goddam that.” If there was a Finicky Eaters Hall of Fame, Joe’s bust would be front and center in the geriatric division. He and his wife would eventually die of malnutrition because twenty-five bucks a week was “too goddam much to spend on groceries.”

   Because we went our separate ways during the day, we were on our own for breakfast and lunch, but dinner, well that was a meal. The nightly feast was served at a big table under a tall, old tree in the front yard. The whole group dined together, with the setting sun as a backdrop.          

   Now, it was a table in the loosest sense of the word. We ate off boards, old doors, or plywood sheets supported by sawbucks. This arrangement could expand and contract as needed. The older folks got the few chairs the kitchen offered. The rest of us sat on coolers, barrels, five-gallon buckets, or benches made of planks supported by whatever we could find. Everybody loved it except Joe, but not even he could spoil the mood of a meal shared outdoors in Nature’s splendor.

   One night it was my wife’s turn to prepare the meal. In the short time we’d been married she had become an excellent cook. Not a chef, a cook. None of her meals had fancy names or even capital letters. It was, and still is, just good food for real people, and plenty of it. On that particular evening she had called everyone to the table. No one had to be called twice—except for Joe. He just sat in his folding chair about forty feet away, arms crossed, glaring at her. She paid him no mind as she went back to her final preparations.

   The second time she called him, everyone was seated and ready. He didn’t budge. She said nothing but it was obvious she was getting agitated. The new gusto she was putting into her work was evidence of that. Even our young daughters sensed that they had better be on their best behavior.

    Finally, she’d had it. She ran over to him yelling loud enough to be heard in town, waving her arms and poking her finger at his face. What she said was last seen in a blue cloud headed toward Manitowoc. Within seconds he sprinted for the table, ate everything without complaint, and even asked for seconds.

   What caused this sudden change of heart?  The wife had been slicing vegetables with a large kitchen knife and forgot to put it down when she went to “entice” him to the table. That’s what she was unknowingly waving inches from his nose. He never complained about another meal—at least not when she was cooking. 

Stent or Stint: At the Heart of the Debate

   This first entry in my “Language Butchery” series is very near and dear to my heart, literally.

   In the summer of 2011 I failed a stress test and was sent to the hospital for further testing. As he probed my arteries in the cardiac catheter lab, the doctor found a 95% blockage in one of them, the proximal circumflex to be exact. After he did an angioplasty to remove the obstruction he inserted an expandable mesh tube in the same area to keep the artery open. That device is called a stent.

E? I? E? I? Oh!

   The doctors, nurses, and everyone else in the hospital pronounced it “st-EH-nt”. Yet, as I go among the stent-less public I find more and more people saying “st-IN-t”. A Google search of “stent or stint” brings up several results. That leads me to believe the confusion extends far beyond my circle of friends.

   With the possible exception of one who hails from the southeastern part of the United States, no patient has ever had a stint implanted in any artery.

   Anyone who uses the word stint when he’s talking about a stent, especially one who says it with an air of authority he doesn’t possess, is like nails on a chalkboard to me. I just want to smack him upside his head but I’m under doctor’s orders not to. In addition to all the other mandates he gave me about diet, exercise, and rest, he specifically wrote in bold letters, “DO NOT SMACK ANYONE UPSIDE THE HEAD.” I didn’t think he knew me that well; I’d met him just the day before. And before you think it, I did not smack him upside his head. My life was in his hands.

   Doctor’s orders against dope-slapping someone who truly deserves it provoke an existential conflict in me that tends to raise my stress to unacceptable levels. There are doctor’s orders against stress, too. No wonder I’m stressed.

   I’ve already described a stent. “Stint” is a verb meaning to be frugal or limiting, as in “Don’t stint on pronouncing stent properly.” It’s also a noun that means a period of time as in “He did his stint in the service.” As you can see, a stint has nothing to do with a device that keeps arteries open.

   For our purposes, we’ll go with the noun and offer the following to help everyone remember the difference between stent and stint: A stent in your artery will lengthen your stint on Earth.

   Please take this to heart. It will lower the stress levels of your stented friends and just might lower your chances of getting a smack upside the head.

(For more information on my experience getting the stent, please read my “Dodging a Bullet” series earlier in this blog.)

To see how a stent is implanted, click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9498DF8TU4

To avoid needing a stent in the first place, check out the American Heart Association at http://www.heart.org/HEARTORG/