Cath, etc.

They Used to Be Called Pompons

Blue Tissue Flower Pom-Poms from Martha Stewart Crafts

I don't know about you, but I'm fascinated by the evolution of language. I mean at what point did we stop speaking Middle English and exchange it for words like postsantum depression in the Urban Dictionary? Hilarious I might add.

I mean, I had to memorize the General Prologue from the Canterbury Tales  by Geoffery Chaucer and recite it in front of my AP English class when I was a senior in high school. In fact, I can still remember the first two lines (OK, I had to look up the spellings):

Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote The droghte of March hath perced to the roote We read as many "tales" as we could take, I'm sure, and all in this ancient rhyme. On to the language of Shakespeare, Jane Austen, even Mark Twain, and we could barely figure out what everyone was talking about  at any given time. So today, when I had to write the word "pompon" in a blog post I was writing for work, I said to myself No one in their right mind calls them pompons anymore. What kind of a git will I be if I spell it correctly? Then I remembered that we had even changed the antiquated pompon to pom-pom in the Paper Crafts style guide recently. As it so happens, paper crafters use a lot of bitty pom-poms in their projects, so this has been a troublesome issue when writing supply lists and instructions for the magazine. So I thought, OK, if Paper Crafts  can say pom-pom, and even the venerable Martha Stewart is using pom-pom, then surely I can too? I know, right? But it made me wonder--where am I getting the sense that pompon is outdated and pom-pom is its more contemporary independent liberal sister? In other words, how does language change and why? And who gets to decide what changes are OK? As in, why did it used to be one pair for the singular, and two pairs for the plural and now it's just peachy keeno fine to say two pair? It's even listed in the dictionary as correct. It's the second option, but it's correct. Drives me batty, I tell ya. Or when did that rule about never ending a sentence with a prepostion get tossed out? I can't stand to end sentences with a preposition. I'm still writing sentences like this: I am amazed at the state in which we have found ourselves. No way I could ever say I am amazed at the state we have found ourselves in. Yuck! I get heebie jeebies all over my body. And yet, when I write or talk that way, I feel and sound so formal. So git-ish. I could go on and on, and I'm sure at various points I will. But really the amazing thing is the debate we can have over one little letter variation (plus a hyphen) in a word. Pompon. Seriously?

Pet Peeve

Using an apostrophe for a plural.

Never needed. Don't do it. Ever.

If you want to turn one thing into more than one thing add an "s" or "es."

That's it.

Easy peasy.

Done.

Kaput.

Thanks for listening.

What's one of your pet peeve's peeves?

My New Toothbrush

...is pretty much fandangled.

It's pretty funky looking, if you ask me. And it's got a bunch of bells and whistles (can toothbrushes have bells and whistles?) that I guess I'm supposed to want need.

Like a "soft grip handle." I guess that's to help me grasp the toothbrush while I'm brushing to avoid that pesky little toothbrush from flying wildly out of my hands as I brush. That was happening all the time to me with my last toothbrush.

It also has "soft dentist-like polishing cups [that] help delicately remove stains." My response to this is:

• A) When did we become so obsessed with "stains" on our teeth in the first place?
• B) Are our teeth truly so stained to begin with? because I hate to think about all those people running around with unsightly stained teeth in all those centuries before we knew that disgusting teeth stains would utterly destroy our lives, and
• C) I haven't been exposed to "soft dentist-like polishing cups" in like 10 years. Now my dentist blasts my mouth with a nasty baking soda solution that leaves grit all over everything including my eyelashes and ears and leaves me feeling like my mouth has been through a meat grinder.

The "tapered bristles clean between teeth and along the gumline" which is very comforting to know, since that's exactly what I need a toothbrush to do in the first place.

My favorite aspect of my new toothbrush, however, is the "unique tongue cleaner [that] helps comfortably remove odor-causing bacteria." Now isn't that refreshing. As though I can't just use the bristles of my toothbrush to brush my tongue, I've got to have some fancy, bristly pad on the back of the brush that not only cleans my tongue should I so desire to use it in that fashion but it also brushes the inside of my lips.

Which, if you haven't experienced it, is the weirdest feeling in the world--and quite unexpected, I might add, and not altogether pleasant whatsoever.

Makes me grateful for all those marketing folks who sit in their fancy offices and spend their days thinking up ways to "new and improve" products and then convince us that we want need them in our lives if we are to be happy, productive, good little Americans.

Is it too much to ask just to give me a toothbrush that will clean my teeth?

Apparently so.

What is 15?

The number of times the word "maverick" was used in the Vice Presidential debates.

Count 'em here.

If you had played this game, you'd be schnockered by now.

_{Photo Credit}

It's Just Not in the Cards

Whenever I visit my nieces and nephew in New Hampshire, one of our favorite things to do is play cards. We usually play Go Fish and Crazy Eights. I love to play with them, mostly because of the side conversations we have while playing. But no matter how much they beg me, I won't play War because I think it is pretty much the most boring game imagineable. Just because my nieces and nephew are the cutest things next to my own two children, it doesn't make War any more appealing to me. And of course, they know this. Every time we sit down to play I am assailed with "Aunt Cath, can we play War?" Emphasis on the word "war" so as to emulate the exact way that they say the word, begging me, knowing how much I loathe the game, taunting me with the possibility. There's no other way to fight back except to increase our options. So this year I decided they were ready for two of my favorites, which are variations of the same game, Speed and Spit.

When I was in junior high, especially, I spent hours and hours playing these games with my friends. They are lively and fast, and you have to really be on your toes if you're going to win. And winning is what it's all about.  I know, right?

Mostly though, I remember playing Spit with my dad. Instead of dealing the cards to each player one first, then the other, my dad and I would make setting up the game a game in and of  itself. The first challenge was to split the deck into two equal halves. The difficulty for the person dealing was to split it exactly in half by sight and feel alone. When it was my turn to "deal," I remember knocking the deck on the slick surface of the table to make sure that each card was "chinked" into its place, eyeballing that deck of cards with the intensity of an archer looking for a bullseye, and slipping my middle finger through the center of the deck at what keenly felt like a measured half. If one half of the deck felt even one card too light, I would borrow the extraneous weight from the other.

In Spit, you set the game up by forming four piles of four cards with one card overturned on each pile, with six cards left over as "spit" piles (I see that my way of playing varies from the official rules linked here.) The dealer would shout, "Ready, set, go!" and the race was on to set up the piles the fastest. One-two-three-four, over; one-two-three-four, over; one-two-three-four, over; one-two-three-four, over; then one-two-three-four-five-six-done! It had a rhythm, it was percussive, and it was imperative to win.

If you were the fastest at setting up the game you claimed those bragging rights. But even more importantly, if there were no leftover cards in either person's hands at the end of the set-up, you were deemed The Master Deck Splitter-In-Halfer.

I taught this charming pre-game show to my niece and nephew, but I'm not sure they appreciated the importance of the challenge.  All in good time.

The true challenge of playing cards at my brother's house, though, is that they have about 6 decks of cards in the basket that sits on the living room coffee table, not one of them complete. (They are, however, perfect for making enormous, if unstable, card houses.)

On one of our jaunts out and about New Hampshire, we found ourselves at the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester (which, by the way, has not one Currier and Ives masterpiece in the entire building, but lots of other wonderful works of modern art.)

Awesome sculpture in front of museum:

 My card-playing buddies beneath the sculpture:

After a great time in the museum, I decided to buy a deck of cards at the gift shop. It would be a token of my affection and esteem, a remembrance of our day seeing beautiful, historic paintings, and we'd finally have a freakin' complete deck of cards with which to play our new games.

I chose a deck which looked like it had paintings similar to the ones we had just seen in the museum, I laid out my 9 bucks, and we went happily on our way.

When we got back home, we got out the deck of cards, took them out, and started looking at the pretty paintings on the face cards. There was a Picasso, there was a van Gogh, there was a Rembrandt, there was a Monet, there was a Cassat, and there was a man carrying a goat around his shoulders completely naked. I mean, with everything hanging out. And I mean everything.

Oh my. This would not do. And mind you, I am no prude, especially when it comes to art.

But why? why? when there are so many interesting and appropriate-for-all-ages paintings in the world from which to choose, must we have a card with a painting entitled something like "Young Boy with Goat" in which there was nothing about this naked "boy" that was remotely young?

And so, the cards went back in the box (in spite of the children's cries, "I wanna see! Hey I wanna see!"), they made the long trip home to Utah, and they now reside with Beccah, my art-major daughter, who, at the tender age of 19, really doesn't mind a card in her deck exhibiting full frontal male nudity. For art's sake, of course.

I guess for the rest of us, it just wasn't in the cards.