An alert user of the social medium, Facebook, posted something brilliant:

“I sure wish we had some of that green chile from Colorado.”

Said no one.

Ever.

I spotted this post on the Facebook page of former Las Vegas and current Seattle-ite Ileana Gonzales. She said in 16 words what takes me several paragraphs to express.

You may have read in past columns my unceasing praise of green chile. My youngest son, Ben, spent his summers working at Lowe’s on Seventh Street. He indicated early in his tenure there that because he was the new kid on the block, at 16, one of his duties was to roast the sacks of green chile in the store parking lot.

It’s a messy, smoky job, but something in the fruit/vegetable from Hatch, N.M., triggers the olfactory system of the chile buyer and makes him/her generous. Several times, a customer, intoxicated by the aroma of the chile, tipped my son. He liked that. Continue reading →

Do you think it’ll work? For this Super Bowl edition of Work of Art, I asked a number of athletes, employees of the City Recreation Center — people who follow football — to predict the winner and the final score of Sunday’s game.

Surprisingly, only West Las Vegas High School junior Brandon Gallegos predicted anything close to a slaughter. Brandon picks the Seattle Seahawks to beat the Denver Broncos 42-24. And why does he choose the Seahawks? “I don’t like Denver.” That’s reason enough.

Those who predicted a final score were extremely conservative, for the most part, choosing either the Broncos or the Seahawks winning by a touchdown or even a field goal. Except for Brandon, the participants in this informal poll kept the scores in the teens, twenties and low thirties.

The experiment mentioned above will be simply to tally all the predicted scores and come up with an average. We’ll see how close our local experts come to guessing the winner of Super Bowl XLVIII final score. With experts like these, we don’t need odds makers from the bigger Las Vegas. Continue reading →

It seems as if we’ll be stuck with it forever. A poll of 1,173 adults, conducted by researchers at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., discovered that the word “whatever,” has — for the fifth straight year — secured the title as the most annoying word in conversation.

But before we hoist the trophy higher than the Seattle Seahawks will raise theirs in two weeks, let me explain that “whatever” has company. Thirty-eight percent of the respondents to the telephone survey chose “whatever” as most annoying, followed by words we hear daily in Las Vegas: “like,” 22 percent; “ya know,” 18 percent. Also getting votes were “just sayin’” and “obviously.”

What inheres in a word that makes our back teeth ache? Well, I’ve spent hours trying to explain that certain words are pretty, others not. “The murmuring of innumerable bees” is pretty; the f-word is not. And we’re not necessarily referring to what the words represent — solely to the sounds they make.

And there’s also a bit of semantics that tempers our like or dislike of words. Continue reading →

What’s so funny? John Adams, a long-time member of the Highlands University English Department, often asked me that between classes at Mortimer Hall.

Unlike several other members of the Humanities faculty of yesteryear, Adams was an 8-to-5-er. If not in class, he was in his office. Therefore, he heard every giggle and chuckle that emanated from my journalism and speech classes down the hall.

His question was honest: What’s so funny? But before parsing the question, let me explain that in my experience, asking “What’s so funny?” is often a prelude to a fight, or at least to a disagreement. I believe my English colleague was sincere; he wanted to be privy to whatever ribald humor emanated from my classroom.

I’d invariably make up some Dallas Cowboy joke; he’d chuckle, and we’d go on. Now, before you accuse me of having wasted countless taxpayer dollars, let me explain that indeed I incorporated humor into my lecture-discussions, but not that much. Some people, I’m convinced, believe that learning takes place only with students’ heads buried in a book and in a silent room. I beg to differ. Continue reading →

You may call me a numismatist or a numismatic. But before you start inquiring as to how it feels, or whether I need to register as a numismatist for life or how many times I’ve had to change my residence because of its proximity to a school or church, or whether there’s a cure for this affliction, let me explain that what I am is fairly innocuous.

So what is this deep secret? Well, I merely consider myself a collector of coins and currency. I’m not like the serious collectors who own coin books, subscribe to journals on the subject and attend conventions. No, I’m merely one who dabbles and likes to play with money, what little I have.

In the really olden days, when I was 11, my dad made sure always to have several coins in his pocket. In those days, coins jingled; nowadays they make a dull thud. Dad told me I could be popular with the girls if they suspected I was flush. I’d carried a quarter in my pocket, the fruits of a week’s worth of selling Optics on the street. But the quarter lacked a companion, something to cling and clang against. Continue reading →

An old-time commercial that advertised a controlled, measured laxative featured a woman asking the rhetorical question about prunes: “Is one enough? Are three too many?”

That question goes right up my alley, but my preference is to think of too few/too many in the context of punctuation marks. Specifically, I believe people are slaves to the notion that “If one is good for you, two are even better.” We can use that analogy when discussing aspirin, Tums, cough syrup, cigarettes and burgers.

In this context, I wonder why people feel the need to sprinkle their prose with profuse punctuation marks. One comment on Facebook included a string of exclamation points strewn across the page, like this: !!!!!!!.

Get the message? If you’re really uncertain about an issue, you punctuate it like this: ??????. And when you feel strongly, try this: !!!!!!!. Continue reading →

The question was: “What do you call those things you put a candle into and line your driveway with?” The answer was: “They’re luminarias, but in some places, they’re called farolitos.”

Alas, but a once-and-for-all answer is not possible. Researching something like the difference between the two terms, which surface each Christmas season, isn’t a question of exhaustive sources; rather, it’s a matter of being selective:

There are reams of articles on these topics.

We contacted a few people from northern New Mexico to get their take on luminarias and farolitos, and while there is some agreement on terms, people put their own slant on things.
Rudy Laumbach maintains that the farolito is the item that contains a candle, whereas the luminaria is really a bonfire. And how does a farolito become a luminaria? Well, it happens when the paper bag that encloses the candle ignites and starts a bonfire. Continue reading →

Just when you think you’ve heard it all, there comes a new excuse, a new diagnosis, a new cop-out. Anyone who’s followed the news recently probably has learned a new word: “affluenza.”

Give us a break, your honor! But first let me explain:

A 16-year-old boy, a Texas youth, drunk, with three times the presumed level of intoxication, loses control of his truck and plows into a group of pedestrians. In its wake, the massacre takes the lives of a woman, her daughter and two others.

The driver, Ethan Couch, received an underwhelming sentence of 10 years’ probation after confessing to having been intoxicated. His defense team came up with a term that explains everything. Continue reading →

Pop Quiz: Who can name all 10 reindeer? Yes, 10 of them. I’m sure most people will come up with Dasher and Dancer, Hansel and Gretel, Comet and Cupid, Sleepy and Bashful, but there is a tenth whose name will appear at the end.

Is it just me (or, as my English teacher would say, “Is it just I?”), who becomes giddy this time year, knowing 40 reindeer paws will land on my roof in a couple of weeks? Here are some observations I’ve made over the years:

Sunday night, we spent a couple of hours enjoying an all-female Irish group called the Celtic Woman, who sang Christmas carols. Notice I didn’t write “Holiday Carols.” This group of young women with such beautiful voices used words like “Gentlemen” in “God rest ye merry,” and not “Gentle-persons.” Continue reading →

Here’s a huge admission: Remember that time an incensed seventh- and eighth-grade homeroom teacher at Immaculate Conception School mockingly said, “One student even gave this answer when I asked you students to draw three kinds of angles.”

The nun drew a couple of lines, one of them pointing to the left. She waited for classroom reaction, which in seconds produced the desired collective shaking of students’ heads and a whispered, “What a loser!”

Minutes before that hand-in assignment, I’d heard kids buzzing about obtuse, acute and right angles, but I had no idea what any of them meant, much less how to draw them. Accordingly, I reasoned that if there’s a right angle, there’s a left angle. And that was my answer.

Mercifully, Sister Mary Angle Angel didn’t name the errant student, but my blush probably gave me away. The truth is that I’d missed 10 days of school, with a sneezing condition like I now have — 60 years later. Continue reading →