“I better not catch him looking at my girl.” Well, aside from the fact that “I” should really be “I’d,” or “I had,” the sentence does pose a threat, the kind kids make on playgrounds, usually under the guise of wanting to protect his girl, his property, as if anyone in the school were the possession of someone else.

But let’s put this into context. The implied “better not” message apparently is that the other fellow who looks at the girl is owed a beating. But the threat doesn’t say that at all. It simply implies it would be best if the “owner” doesn’t find out about the gawking.

Simple? One of these “better not” threats came at the end of a forever-forwarded e-mail message. Titled “Strange Coincidences,” it exhorted the thousands of recipients to pass it on, chain-letter style. The e-mail provided some interesting information of the multiple Biblical references to Iraq. One of them places the Garden of Eden in Iraq, and another says, “Mesopotamia, which is now Iraq, was the cradle of civilization.” The e-mail also locates Noah’s Ark and the Tower of Babel in Iraq.

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What kind of cream puffs are we raising? Does handling the controls of a Wii constitute the sum total of kids’ activity?My grandson and namesake received a Wii for his birthday, a joint gift to be shared with his brother, whose birthday is a few days later in the year.

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School has started, and it looks as if my co-teacher Tom McDonald and I have been blessed with an eager, albeit small, group of students interested in the journalism course we’re offering at Highlands.

Strange, but the eight years since I retired have at once given me confidence and made me more meticulous about planning lessons. Mainly, I find it necessary to move into the 21st century and put aside some of the bromides I used before.

The language of journalism, mainly what we call Associated Press Style, hasn’t changed a great deal since 1999, when I taught my last journalism class. Yet, regarding the use of technology, I’m feeling like the student, not the prof.

It would be easy to fall back into delivering lecture 107, a practice I swore I’d never cultivate.

Let me explain:

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Remember the times when one needed a tool to open a can or bottle?

That was in the days before dozens of techniques were developed to ease access to stuff. A husband once came home to his wife’s announcement that the electricity had gone off and therefore, no supper.

“But we cook with gas,” he said. She answered, “But the can opener’s electric.”

When I was a child, opening a can of cat food required the use of an 80-pound opener which, if you dropped it, would open your foot instead. Today, my wife showed up with an eight-pack of cat food that comes in plastic cups with an easy-open foil on top. Times have changed.

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It’s amazing how things can (almost) change in an instant. Everybody dreads that unwelcome phone call telling of an accident or other tragedy and wishes it away.

The parentheses-enclosed “almost” indicates there was no tragedy, but it was the next – nearest thing.

But first, some background:

At first I really resented the presidential fiat that nobody travel more than 55 mph. That was in the ‘70s and part of the ‘80s, when a presumed gas shortage was supposed to be alleviated if everybody slowed down, even on toll roads, engineered to accommodate huge volumes of traffic at high speeds.

That was then. I grew to enjoy it and even today keep a bit under the limit. The lower speed limit gave us time to enjoy the scenery; it decreased everyone’s likelihood of being killed. Yet, there were those who fought it. They reasoned that a 55-mile trip now would take a full hour, whereas before the speed limit, the same distance would take about 45 minutes.

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We used to have names for people in our youth who made a bad impression. Any girl, doomed to never having a second date, who 1) dipped her straw into the guy’s malt or tied a knot in his straw, 2) expected the guy to pay for her meal, or 3) (in later, more affluent times) ordered the most expensive item on the menu, got relegated to the lowest rung of huwomanity. She became a “mensa.”

We’d dismiss these junior high and high school schoolmates with much derision, even though those about whom we’d say, “Es una mensa” more likely wouldn’t have dreamed of a second date with us anyway.

My English/Spanish dictionary defines mensa or menso as someone who’s dull and witless. It’s a coincidence, then, that Mensa (with a capital “M”) is also Latin for “table” and is the name of a prestigious organization of bright people, those whose intelligence is verified through a tough series of tests.

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In an incident that happens only in movies, one day my father received a windfall — literally, some 20 years ago, while in his 80s, as he spent time in his garden.Mostly, he cleaned, scooping up dead leaves. It was early spring. As he bent over to scoop up a pile, he noticed some faded currency, which he took to be a dollar bill. Look again, J.D. — that’s a hundred dollar bill.

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A game/contest on National Public Radio, which I find addictive, asks participants to guess the title of a book, movie, poem, etc. on the basis of various verbal clues. The catch is that one letter in one word in the answer will have been changed.For example, the person who is “it” gets told that this movie concerns Russell Crowe, as Prof. John Forbes Nash, who is pondering the loveliness of a chocolate confection. How much time lapses before the guesser comes up with “A Beautiful Mint”?

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The world of deadline journalism presents challenges. On countless occasions, I’ve explained to a critical reader — or an even more critical reading public — that we at the Optic didn’t make the errors; rather, the typos resulted from something else.Like the kid who swears, “Gee, Mom, I was just playing, and all of a sudden, the vase fell all by itself — honest,” we’d like to hear from readers who say, “Out of the 20,000 words you printed today, 19,998 were correct.” But we seldom hear about correct spelling or punctuation.

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Last week’s column sent a couple of acquaintances to the dictionary to keep me honest; I’d used the word “sublime” as a verb, in the context of causing a solid to convert to a vapor, and back again, with the application of heat.

Granted, to sublime something is not an expression one hears every day, except in laboratories. Nevertheless, these friends, who at first challenged my use of the word, managed to work it into a later conversation. But their tone indicated disdain, as if to say, “Yeah, sure, you think you’ve coined a word and expect us to fall for it,” rather than “Gee, I never thought of that.”

One of them then brought up her pet peeve, namely gluing “-ize” to words that shouldn’t have such attachments. For example, it’s acceptable, and even efficient, to choose “hospitalize” in place of “admit to the hospital,” or “politicize” in place of “inject politics into.” These terms are fine, and we have many of them. But why utilize “utilize” when we should use “use”?

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