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Tuesday, July 10, 2012

speaking of


So here we are.
Let’s see where a single thought takes us today:

Ernest Borgnine is gone. Rats. He’s one of those people that I always wanted to meet. Not just because he was a great actor, but he seemed like a guy who’d be fun to be around and have fabulous stories to tell. Just last week, there was a promo for the Turner Classic Movies Cruise, and there was a shot of him during a previous cruise. My husband and I both agreed that as much as we’d love to hang out with Borgnine, a boat may not be the best place to do that, lest we spend the entire cruise quoting The Poseidon Adventure and making sure we could find our way to the one-inch thick part of the ship’s hull, just in case. (Granted, in the water I am a very skinny lady.)
Speaking of lost legends, I’m not sure what’s worse: losing legends or seeing people hop on this crazy, disingenuous Twitter RIP bandwagon for someone they couldn’t give a fig about while the legend was alive. 
Speaking of the RIP bandwagon, if there is any trace amount of good that could possibly come out of Andy Griffith’s passing, it’s that all of those people who looked at me funny when I told them to watch A Face in the Crowd are finally seeing the damn movie and understanding why I got angry when they would say, Andy Griffith? Really? Shuck yeah, really!
Speaking of shuck, I just now came up with shuck as a curse substitute. It’s not to be confused with shucks, as in aw, shucks, ma’am. Don’t get me wrong. I swear a lot. Real swears, too. But occasionally I like to shake things up and be a little more colorful. Anyone can say fuck or shit. I’m trying shuck. I’m not sure that it’s effective, but I am so tired of the fracks and fricks and frells and fudges. (That may be the only sentence where I unintentionally imply that I am tired of fudge.) 
Speaking of fudge, why doesn’t fudge melt? Maybe that’s why every beach town has a shop that sells homemade fudge in the summer and closes in the winter. I’m not complaining about there being so many fudge shops in beach towns, but I don’t like the beach, and quaint fudgeries are not as readily available to inlanders as one might think. I also just made up fudgeries. (Fudgery (singular): Noun, meaning retail outlet that specializes in fudge. Also, plural: Fudgeries, as in Martha’s Vineyard features an assortment of shops, restaurants, and fudgeries.) You want fudge now, don’t you? 
Speaking of fudge shops that close in the winter, it irks me even more when I see ice cream and frozen custard stands close in the winter. There is nothing more depressing than traveling to a new city and making a pilgrimage to the local legendary mom-and-pop ice cream place only to find it closed for the season. Soup and coffee places don’t go out of business in the summertime. Get a blanket and a space heater and man up, creameries! (This is how I justify fudgeries. If there are creameries, there can be fudgeries.)
Speaking of fudgeries and other words I have made up, I once thought that I’d actually made up the word uglify when I was in the eighth grade. I’d never heard it or read it before. (Judy Blume never used it. Neither did V.C. Andrews.) I’d seen beautify, so I figured I could “create” uglify. I should have figured out that I was wrong when my English teacher didn’t circle the word in red pencil. Took me another year to finally crack open a dictionary and see my wrongness for myself. So much for my being in the “gifted” program.
Speaking of my being wrong about things, I thought that if I just kept writing, this post might actually find a way to dovetail all of these topics that led to each other, or at least come back around to Borgnine. 
Shuck... and fudge. 
Yes indeed. Welcome to me.

5 comments:

  1. Hah! Love this one!! Heh heh heh, hey Butthead. She said the F word. And then she said shuck.

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  2. Ernest Borgnine probably had grandchildren, some of whom went through grade school in the 1970's through the mid-1980's. We can speculate that these children attended schools that housed, at worst, an inadequate library. Even the most inadequate library would have had a rudimentary children's section, which surely contained a few works by Judy Blume. Out of his numerous grandchildren, it's probably safe to say that one of them read, and rather enjoyed, the book "Superfudge." Perhaps this grandchild X shared his/her love of the book with Papa Ernest. Papa Ernest just loved to hear grandchild X sharing the exploits of the book's pro/antagonist, Farley Drexel Hatcher. Fudge, if you will.
    So fond were his memories of this special bond, every time he went to Martha's Vineyard, strolling past the fudge shops would conjure memories of grandchild X's deep belly-laugh; wanting to savor this feeling, Papa Ernest would always pick up two blocks of peanut butter fudge, and even noted to himself in the heat of mid-July, that the stuff just didn't melt! He would consume one block the next day, and save the other to share with his favorite grandchild.
    I assume the man, at the very least, enjoyed a block of fudge now and then, and probably noticed that it never seems to melt. If I am correct, I have helped complete the Borgnine to Fudge and Back circle.
    Either way, I am going to appropriate "shuck" and start saying it around my coworkers.

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    Replies
    1. Thomas---

      Glad you like "shuck," though clearly you eschew "fudgeries." Thanks for finishing the post.

      ---Stephanie

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    2. Local statutes prohibit the appropriation of more than one new term per week; doing so could lead to the charge of "internet flattery, aggravated" coupled with "writing a novella concerning Ernest Borgnine's imagined affinity for fudge." I'm pretty sure they're going to repossess my VHS copy of Airwolf (season one) if I don't knock it off.

      In full disclosure, I do not intentionally eschew fudgeries.
      I love the shuck out of fudge. It just doesn't love me back, and I disguise my pain as contempt for fudgeries.

      And I have once again unintentionally hijacked your comments section.

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  3. This comment has been removed by the author.

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