It never fails. I win the bet every time but will never win again once people catch on. It’s simple: I like to tell people that they cannot correctly count backwards from 10 to 1. I add that somewhere in the middle numbers there’ll be an inadvertent tangue-toungler to cause them to flub.
Instinctively, they rattle off “10, 9, 8, 7…” and immediately I cut them off with, “You messed up.”
Why? Well, because they didn’t follow directions. If their job is to “count from 10 to 1 backwards, that means they need to follow the 1, 2, 3 sequence.
It’s really a silly little trick, one that has made me so wealthy I’m building a dozen retirement cottages in Pendaries. Well, maybe just a pup tent in my backyard.
It’s the same kind of confidence I exuded when reacting to an e-mail from Joann Martinez, the former Carnegie librarian. The message asks us to pronounce certain words correctly the first time.
I was up for the challenge, and to keep things honest, recorded myself.
Try it yourself:
The bandage was wound around the wound. The farm was used to produce produce. The seamstress and the sewer fell into the sewer. The dump was so full that it had to refuse more refuse.
The first and second pairs were easy enough, the sewer/sewer pair was trickier, but both forms of “refuse” gave me grief. Whereas in the first two pairs, a simple vowel change fixes it, in “refuse” we also have a wretched “s” parading as a “z,” and that complicates things.
One wonders why, given the immensity of the English language, so many of its words are the same and therefore confusing.
Highlands University once had a student with the surname of “Bigot.” Now, having that kind of name invites jokes, derision and a whole lot of questioning. A bigot, we all know, is an intolerant person who accepts no opinions but his own.
So who would just happen to sign up for my bulging beginning speech class but Mr. Bigot. Realizing it would be hard to calm the class down as I called roll and came to his name, way up high in the alphabet, I hesitated, thought about calling out his last name, relying purely on the phonetic clues: big-ut.
Well, the student put me out of my misery by taking the initiative and pronouncing it “be-zhow.” Close enough. I quickly learned the pronunciation but continue to wonder why the French can’t simply pronounce it “big-ut” and be done with it.
My acceptance of whatever way the student pronounced his name, nevertheless, is questioned by a certified teacher of French, who argues that such a name, with its particular combination of vowels and consonants, would undoubtedly have a hard “g.” Thus, the teacher posits, “Mr. Bigot either made up the pronunciation or wasn’t of French extraction.”
• • •
How do you make holy water? You boil the hell out of it.
Or just bottle it. This goes under the heading of “Things a columnist wouldn’t know if he didn’t open his e-mail.”
A few weeks ago I received an advertisement titled simply “Holy Water.” After further review, I discovered there was a sales pitch: buy any of three varieties and you can achieve serenity, self-confidence and greatness.
A closeup view of the bottles fails to show whether the water’s really been blessed, but the message is the same: drink, believe, succeed. It’s expensive too. Though comparable to bottled water available here, the shipping of the water more than doubles the price. In the message line of the e-mail is the notation, complete with an absent apostrophe: “Changing the worlds spirit one bottle at a time.”
Upon cracking open each bottle, the user can drink, believe and succeed by reading various inspirational messages on the labels.
Perhaps it works for some, but belief is something that simply inheres in many people. The mere purchase and consumption of a liquid-filled plastic bottle girded with religious symbolism doesn’t cut it. Do we need to purchase expensive bottled water, with the dubious claim that it’s “holy” in order to succeed and acquire peace of mind?
And is holy water even intended for drinking anyway?
• • •
An infomercial on Telemundo offers a medallion coated with 24-karat gold that is guaranteed to do five things: bring you happiness, make you well, put you behind the wheel of a shiny new black convertible, mend your love life and bring you prosperity.
The medallion is huge, almost the size of a Personal Pan Pizza. Indeed it could save the wearer’s life, but only if placed appropriately over his body in case of a drive-by.
The voice-over claims the medallion has helped thousands of people — not only Catholics, but others of the Christian persuasion as well as those of other faiths. The clincher is the the assertion that it carries a personal guarantee from Jesus Christ.
Perhaps some might call me the world’s biggest iconoclast, but I vehemently object to commercialism that goes too far in invoking the deity in attempts to sell bottled water or medallions — or any other ruse.