“Want to know what a ‘sapo’ is? It’s the New York Giants beating the New England Patriots” in the recent Super Bowl. “See how that guy caught the ball on his helmet?” The emphatic utterer of this sapo-istry was Ron Maestas, professor, coach, referee and athlete. Of course, he was referring also to a recent column on sapos, and of this month’s Super Bowl. To review: Sapo means toad, but around here, we call a sapo any lucky shot, regardless of sport. The amazing thing about this part of northern New Mexico sapodom is that the word refers only to the other guys, not to ourselves.Thus, if my grandson and namesake sinks an all-net basket from 25 feet out, that’s a sapo. If I do it, it’s skill.

Ron made his statement as I huffed and puffed on a treadmill at the Abe Montoya Rec Center. I’ve had time to assess his assessment, so here goes: Continue reading →

As long as the language is English, it’s likely that what one thinks he heard will be far different from what gets written. Let me explain:A former student editor of mine wrote that his mother had just completed her kemo-therapy regime (regime should be regimen, but that’s a topic for a future column).

The chemo prefix comes from the word chemistry or chemical. But why give it a “k” sound when we have many perfectly good words that begin with “ch” and sound like it: cheese, chair, chum? When the editor wrote kemo-therapy, I imagined Tonto, the Lone Ranger’s faithful Indian companion, comforting the masked man with, “You’ll be OK after I suck the rattlesnake venom out of your ankle, Kemo-sabe.” Continue reading →

“With all the bragging people do nowadays about gas mileage, I do what others do to guarantee great mileage.”

And what is that?

“I lie about it.” Sometimes I claim fantastic automotive efficiency, when in reality, the kind of mileage I usually get can be measured in gallons per mile.

We’ve known people who couldn’t stand for anyone to be one up. And our enjoyment comes in planting a mythical number or amount and watching someone try to top it.

The first person is at an obvious disadvantage because all the second person needs to do is raise the figure.

For example, years back, my neighbor in Cuba, N.M., had just bought a new ‘72 AMC Gremlin, like ours. He asked what kind of mileage I got. “About 24 miles a gallon.” Continue reading →

Victory sometimes takes years to achieve. It took a long time to persuade some members of my congregation that the annual meeting doesn’t necessarily have to conflict with the Super Bowl. It did one year, when my Oakland Raiders beat Philadelphia. And that was during the times when video recorders sold for $600 and Tivo was several dreams away. Not only did our meeting take place on the same day as the big game, it was scheduled for the same hours as well.

“Don’t you see, Art, that we’re doing the work of the Lord? And besides, the Lord doesn’t care about a football game,” one member said. I concluded the Lord most certainly would be at the game, and our annual meeting in the future could and should be moved up or back a week.

My remark was that I’d phoned Paul Tagliabue, then-commissioner of football, to ask whether the date of the Super Bowl could be changed to accommodate my church’s schedule. I told members of my church, “Paul Tagliabue seems a lot more flexible than some of you.”

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One of the more telling lines about language was uttered by Jack Lemmon in the 1965 movie, “How to Murder Your Wife.”

A confirmed bachelor, Stanley Ford, played by Lemmon, gets drunk at a bachelor party, proposes to the beautiful Virna Lisi, who’s just jumped out of a cake, and gets hooked, compliments of an equally inebriated judge.

The next morning, Ford awakens to find Lisi next to him in bed and discovers she speaks no English, only Italian.

He asks something like, “What’s your name?” but realizes there’s no way she’d understand, so he changes it to “What’s-a your-a name-a.”

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Always a decent speller, I’ve consistently struggled to explain to others why it’s important. Often, when I try to point out the egregious use of a word or phrase, the pontificatee comes back with “So what’s the big deal?”

In college, I was impressed when the art history professor, the late Elmer Schooley, said, “I eat nails when I see careless misspelling.” Continue reading →

Almost every morning since Christmas, I’ve awakened to find a different item covering the receiver that goes with the TV set and allows us to receive a zillion channels, most of which deal with shopping and preaching.

On the first day of Christmas my true love gave to me . . . a sock that covered the blue light on the receiver that tells us it’s on. On the second day, My Delight balanced a pecan turtle over the blue light.

On the third day of Christmas, my spouse (by the way, the true love, My Delight and my spouse are one and the same) stood up a greeting card. Each day featured a different barrier.

My iPod has become the permanent blocking fixture. Continue reading →

No matter how hard I try, I can’t grasp various temporal and spatial concepts.For example, I’ve never understood it when someone says he rode in his convertible “with the top down.” Fortunately, there are few convertibles anymore, so I don’t have to think. But seriously, does having the top down mean the convertible was closed? Or was it open?

Another concept I’ve wrestled with is the idea of “setting the clock back” for the time change. To me, setting the clock back means reversing the motion of the hands. Ergo, at 2 a.m., if we set the hands to read 1 a.m., we’ve “set the clock back.” I say this because “setting the clock back” is (to me) the act of backing up the time or reversing the order. Continue reading →

This end-of-the-year column provides an opportunity to catch up on correspondence, compliments, digs, suggestions and much more.Several people provided feedback on a recent column on growing up in Las Vegas in the ‘50s and being harassed by neighborhood toughs who thought of me as a rich boy.

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Around the time that film cameras were still being bought, slightly before the digital camera revolution took hold, my brother Severino and I competed regarding the number of millimeters we owned.

If my brother showed up with a camera whose zoom lens went from 75mm to 200mm, I would have to try to top that with a lens as wide as 74 and as long as 201mm. Well, cameras just don’t work that way. You can’t buy a lens of a specific size the way you would a skein of yarn or a bolt of cloth.

With the ubiquity of digital cameras, people now seem content to brag about the number of megapixels their camera has, the way people tout horsepower, interest rates, gigabytes and implants.

As long as humans have been around, there’s always been a need to make comparisons. We have to be stronger, richer, smarter, wiser. One way is to attack youth, as if it were something to be avoided rather than a necessary step to maturity.

In fact, the very concept of maturity is in itself puzzling.

Let me explain: Continue reading →