Oxymoronics

ox-y-mo·ron'-ic (ŏk-sē-mə-rŏn-ik)

adj.

When things are together that don't normally go together:

1. as in (when talking about the upcoming two episodes of CSI: Miami being the best) "the best of the Miami's" - there's that damn apostrophe again, thrown in where it doesn't belong. Since everything on TV is true, you think they could get the punctuation right. That was actually two examples, and neither good.

2. Putting the letter "e" at the end of words just to make them look fancy (see also: pretentious), as in "I live in Vista Pointe," or calling your store a "shoppe." This is okay if you live in merry olde England, but, alas poor Yorrick, ye don't.

3. Putting two words together to make up a new word might seem oxymoronic, but in fact, half the English language was created this way. Okay, maybe not half, but my brother Jeff made up a cool word when he was a kid: "deflicted." It's a cross between "defective" and "inflicted." This is actually oxymoronic - or ironic - in the sense that he used the word to mean something not good, but if "defective" is the opposite of "effective," then wouldn't "deflicted" be the opposite of "infilcted?" And, if that's the case, wouldn't "deflicted" be a good thing?

4. Oxymoron itself is not an oxymoron. "Ox" means, informally, clumsy or stupid. A "moron" is a person or thing that is really stupid. "Y' is Spanish for "and." Therefore, an oxymoron is a person or thing that is clumsy and really stupid.

5. Sometimes people don't think about what they say before they say it. I could probably go on and on about this but here are a few examples:

a. "He's a close personal friend of mine." Well, if he's a personal friend then isn't he close? That statement is actually a double oxymoron. Anything that's yours is, by definition, personal.

b. I had a platoon sergeant in the Army who would say, "Now I want you to physically walk over to your tank and..." That may not be oxymoronic but it is moronic. I liked him, though, so I guess that makes it okay.

c. Speaking of the Army, the next person that says "Military Intelligence" is an oxymoron or a "contradiction in terms" will be summarily executed. Stupid things do happen in the military, just like any other huge organization. For example, only in the Army can you cram thirty minutes' worth of training into two hours. Okay, so that's not intelligent, and you're entitled to your opinion; just don't get smarmy about it. You didn't think of it first.

6. The two books in my "library." One is "The Intellectual Devotional," which encourages the reader to "expand your mind." The other is one of my mom's "trashy romance novels." That's what I call them, but they're not really trashy; to be fair, most of them are very well written, which proves you should always listen to your mom.

7. Sports commentator Billy Packer always pulling for UNC. He went to Wake Forest University but never says a nice word about the Demon Deacons, or anyone else, for that matter, except maybe the Tarheels. At least he's not a Duke fan.

8. Davidson College Makes the Elite 8. My sister got her degree there. Less than 1700 students and ranked #10 in their bracket in the NCAA tournament. They had the longest winning streak in the country at 25. They beat Gonzaga (#7, 5400 students), then powerhouse Georgetown (#2, more than 7,000 undergrads), pounded Wisconsin (#3, more than 27,000 undergrads), and made #1 Kansas (more than 25,000 undergrads) work, and work hard, for their 2-point win. That is the kind of oxymoron we could have more of.

Camelias

I'm sure this will be the first of many stories about my beloved maternal grandmother Mimi and her equally loved sister Trudy, who lived together in Fayetteville, North Carolina, for as long as I can remember.

I went to college at Wake Forest University, not quite three hours away in Winston-Salem, and whenever I had a 3-day weekend, I would drive down to Fayetteville with Mark Holt, the son of Mimi's preacher. I never even did the trip-to-Florida thing for Spring Break; I would always stay with Mimi and Trudy, who were so often referred to together, that years later, my brother-in-law Steve nicknamed them the "Snoop Sisters."

My Uncle Buddy (Mom's younger brother), his wife Betty Jo, and their kids Melissa and Charles lived around the corner and a block away from Mimi and Trudy. After the camelias bloom, which is happening right now, by the way, Betty Jo would clean the fallen blossoms in her yard and then help Mimi and Trudy with theirs - I will always remember how Mimi and Trudy loved those fragrant creamy white blooms and their dogwood trees.

Well, evidently, if the camelia blooms stay on the ground too long they can cause a blight on the plant - hence an almost constant picking up of camelia blossoms this time of year.

The ladies were out picking the flowers off the ground and Trudy got tired of leaning down, so she got one of those trigger-controlled-grip-extension-device things - for a writer, don't you love my descriptive capabilities? - that you can use to retrieve items such as cannned goods from an upper shelf. After a while, Trudy got tired of picking up camelia blossoms even without having to bend over, so she proceded to pick the unopened buds off the bushes. Such was Trudy. No beating around the bush. And, no, I did not write this just for that pun. It just sort of blossomed.

'mergency! 'mergency!

I'm in my forties and the smell of dog poop makes me nauseous. Want to know why? I didn't think so. I'll tell you anyway.

When I was in first grade, my dad was in Vietnam and we lived in Fayetteville, North Carolina, two houses up from Uncle Buddy and Aunt Betty Jo and around the corner-ish from my grandmother Mimi and her sister Trudy. I was walking home from school and probably thinking about this girl in my class named Allison; our next-door neighbor Michael used to tease me and say she was my girlfriend. What can I say? I started young.

Anyway, I must have been thinking about something very distracting, because I stepped in a big ol' pile of dog poop in my front yard. Now everyone has, at one point or another in their lives, stepped in dog poop, so you know that, first of all, it's the most disgusting smell in the world before you step in it (I know, this is gross, but hang in there), but after?! That's when the real smell hits you! Don't deny it; you know exactly what I'm talking about. Now that's bad enough, but it really gets bad when...

You fall down and smack the smelly spread-out pile with your hand.

To this day, the smell of dog poop makes me almost throw up. The other day my sister Lauren and I took her family's lab Kobe out for a walk. Now when I walk Kobe, I head quickly to any area that is off the sidewalk, off the path, in the bushes somewhere, so that when he does his business, I can kick some dirt over it and no one will be the wiser. However, if he goes in someone's yard, or somewhere in plain sight, I'll clean it up, of course, but not before I pull my shirt up over my nose and hold my breath. Even though that day Lauren cleaned it up and I maintained a safe distance - upwind - of at least ten feet, I still do the field-expedient (Army talk) protective mask thing and pull my shirt up over my nose, even at the risk of looking like a dork and having my sister laugh at me.

This is such a joke in my family, that one year at the beach (our extended family and that of my brother-in-law Steve go to Oak Island, North Carolina every year in July), when my nephew Connor was still in diapers, I volunteered to take him inside and change him. Connor (thank you, Connor), to his credit, didn't smell like a dog, pardon the bad kind-of-pun comment. And I did cover my nose with my shirt. And you can be damn sure I took that diaper back to the beach with us and showed Lauren and my mom; I was proud of myself - I didn't even gag!

I guess when you step in dog poop at an early age, and fall down and get it all over your hand, and throw up three times before you make it to the front door, and run inside screaming "Mommy! Mommy! 'mergency!
'mergency!", and are so traumatized that even as an adult you need to cover your nose when you come anywhere close to dog poop, then successfully changing dirty diapers is a triumph. I may not act my age sometimes, but at least I'm maturing.

Eschew Surplusage!

Have you ever noticed how things change and nobody told you? Sure, when you go back to someplace you haven't been to in a while, things will obviously have changed, but it's like the time you were away gave "life" permission to make some changes: tear that house down and put up a newer bigger "better" one, put in a whole neighborhood where the forest was where you built your fort, and "my just look how much you've grown!"

As a writer, I always try to be grammatically correct, have good diction, and use proper punctuation, but sometime between now and Freshman Comp, "proper" punctuation seems to have changed, or perhaps more like, umm, mutated, know what I'm sayin'? Totally.

I was taught that in a series ("Tom, Dick, and Harry"), there should be a comma between each element, including before the "and." Nowadays, though, that series would be written "Tom, Dick and Harry," with no comma before the "and." So what happened to the comma? I guess it either got lost on the way to the page or it was surplusage eschewed.

"Wha- wha- whaaat???"

And speaking of "and," time was when you couldn't start a sentence with "and." "Time was?" What's that about? Does that mean the phrase right above (literally) these words is saying that "time" used to be "when you couldn't start...." Okay I'm rambling now, but that's the whole point of this. Anyway, I know what "time was" means, but who uses it? Not me. Time was people said "time was," but now couldn't one just say "there was a time.." or "it used to be that...?" This, by the way, is not an example of how surplusage should be eschewed. In this case, more is better.

But, I digress.

Actually, not. But, yes, I digress, because "But I digress" is a line from a really cool song called "This Ain't A Scene, It's An Arms Race," by the group Fall Out Boy.

On the other hand, I don't digress, because it used to be that you couldn't start a sentence with "but" either. "However" was okay and still is. But "but" and "and?" Yeah, you can start a sentence with them now, but since when? I guess I'll have to consult that paragon of English language instruction, the "Little, Brown Handbook," which I always thought was so named because it was small and brown in color (which it was, which confused me even more), but it was really named for the publishers - "Little" and "Brown." Or (aha, another "new" sentence starter!), more correctly "Little Brown" is the publisher), and this is truly a fine example of a run-on sentence.

Okay, I just took a "Little Brown" online comma quiz and it didn't even quiz me on commas in a series - it was only on conjunctive adjectives. "Conjuctive adjectives." Wha-wha-whaaat? So, (yeah, you're thinking about "so" aren't you?), the quiz had two commas in the series, which means that from now on, I'm sticking with what I was taught! Commas are fairly harmless, though; I just put them in where I would pause to take a breath if I was speaking. The apostrophe, though - there's a little punctuation ornament that's just tossed onto the Christmas tree of language wherever anyone damn well pleases!

I've seen questionable grammar, laughable misspellings, bad diction, and horrible misuses of the apostrophe, but the absolute worse - actually, it's the best - example, was on the back of a seat on a bus I was on once in Fort Benning, Georgia, where I was learning all about the TOW missile when I was in the Army. And, it was stenciled on, which means it was official. I love italics. I mean italics. Anyway, the stenciled words were: "No food, no drinks no loud raidio's." Arrrrggghhh!!! That's what my English Comp professor would probably have said. It's certainly what I thought.

Speaking of my English Comp professor, he taught us not to use so many words (unless you're rambling, which, again, is the whole point) when fewer will do. He also taught us not to use words that no one really uses. In other words, don't put on airs with your words - be a bit Hemingway-ish with your diction. He summed this lesson up perfectly, succinctly, and most ironically with the command:

"Eschew Surplusage!"

P.S. For my sake and that of my mom, please never ever use the following words or phrases in text or speech: "whereas," "ipso facto," "if you will," "ergo," "as it were," and "vis-a-vis."

P.P.S If you ever speak the name of a company, "Big Biscuit, Inc.," for example, and you say it " 'Big Biscuit, Ink', " instead of " 'Big Biscuit, Incorporated'," I will hunt you down and kill you.

Isa and the Caution Mower

I'm not a parent (although some day I'd like to be - I still believe in that "soul mate" stuff) but I can enjoy, as much as parents can, the blissful innocence found in the utterrings of children.

When I was two years old, I used to say - or so my mom tells me - "heddigotter" for helicopter and "the big lorter" for ocean (I can only guess that I was trying to say "the big water"). My sister, Lauren, a year younger but a bit more mentally advanced than me, called the big red truck with a siren, hoses, and ladders a "fire $#%&."

I was born in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and Mom's side was from nearby Fayetteville, where we lived when my dad was in Vietnam. That year, when I was five, my mom, Lauren and me, and my aunt Betty Jo and her one-year old daughter, Melissa, were heading to Holden's Beach on the Atlantic for a week. We passed a large mower cutting the grass on the side of the road. On the back of the big vehicle was a bright orange diamond-shaped sign that said: "Caution! Mower." There was some construction going on, so Betty Jo, who was driving, said she had to slow down to get around the caution mower. I saw the sign, but being only five years old, I asked her, "What's a 'caution mower'?" To this day, she still teases me about that - good naturedly, of course.

I am often reminded of the "caution mower" and how I pronounced things - you know how moms like to remind you of such things. I had "heddigotter" and "the big lorter" and my sister had, well...I'm sure you've figured that one out by now.

My niece Isabella, on the other hand (her mom calls her "Isa"), will be three next month, but two years ago, a few months after she turned one - barely one year old- went straight to the ocean (we all lived in Venice Beach, California at the time), pointed, and correctly identified it as "agua." Her mom, Claudia, is teaching her Spanish, and my brother tells me that Isabella - again, not yet three - "can now turn on the computer and then access the internet and find her favorite websites from the favorites list. She prints out coloring pages and pictures on her own. I came in the room the other night to see what she was doing; she was playing a Diego snowboarding game. I'm hoping next month she can load my Turbotax for me and start on my taxes."

I was two and couldn't properly pronounce "water;" Isabella had just turned one and not only could she say "water," she was already bilingual.

Precocious, I wasn't.

Isabella and Natalia

"Okay, let's see...Form 1040, with a biiiiig deduction for me,

and a little one for my baby sister..."

The Big Biscuit

When I was growing up, we pretty much always had a home-cooked dinner. No matter where we lived (Dad was in the Army), the States, Spain, or Germany, we always had a commissary nearby, and, thus, Bisquick, which makes for some quite yummy pancakes.

For dinner, every now and then, Mom would make these incredible biscuits from scratch - okay it was Bisquick, but they sure were good. She'd roll the dough out and use an empty "bits o' BACON" can - one end of which she ingeniously cut off by putting it in the electric opener sideways - to cut out the biscuits. The bacon bits, by the way, were "100% REAL," but with wholesome stuff like sodium phosphates, sodium erythorbate, and sodium nitrite added. After pulling out all the thick circles of dough, she'd take the hole-y framework, mash it all together, and put the red-headed biscuit stepchild - that misshapen item of worship, calls of "dibs," and cries of "it's my turn!" - on the cookie sheet with its perfectly formed biscuit brethren.

Now to this day, I don't know why - I mean it was made from the exact same stuff as those "nice" biscuits - but oh, how important it was for my sister and me to get the big biscuit. Most of these times, my lucky brother was either not yet born or too young to take part in our culinary immaturity.

Speaking of culinary immaturity, I used to put peanut butter and jelly on my hot dogs when I was young. I probably only did it a half-dozen times when I was six or seven, and then just to gross my sister out, but I still get teased for it. That and the "caution mower."