By Tim Sanders

At the risk of sounding sexist, I must say that women can be, on occasion, narrow-minded creatures with no real desire to learn. I say this because my wife is a woman, and over the years she has stubbornly refused to allow me to educate her. Go figure.

The other evening, for example, Marilyn was perusing my previous week’s column. Suddenly she laughed, right out loud. It gave me hope that perhaps she’d finally found some literary merit in my work.

"What is it, dear?" I asked.

"You are a moron," she replied. It wasn’t the answer I was looking for.
"In what sense?" I asked.

"In the sense that you have no sense at all," she said. Then she read the following lines to me, which sounded vaguely familiar:

"Q: You mentioned ‘seasoned politicians.’ How do you season one?

A: We recommend stewing him in a pot of olive oil overnight, periodically adding garlic, cloves, and diced red peppers."

"Did you or did you not write that, word for word?" she asked.

"Well, I suppose I did," I answered. "What of it?"

"And you don’t see anything wrong with that advice?"

"Oh, all right, I suppose I should have said something about laying the politician out on a piece of plywood and tenderizing him with a croquet mallet before putting him into the pot, but most cooks would know all about tenderizing and just do it automatically."

"CROQUET MALLET? First of all, you can tenderize your politician with a croquet mallet or a claw hammer or a baseball bat for all I care! The thing is, you can’t stew a politician in olive oil! You could possibly deep fry a politician in olive oil, but anybody with a lick of sense would know you’d stew your politician in a pot of water! WATER!"

"I think you’re missing the point, which actually has nothing to do with tenderizing or stewing politicians, only with seasoning them. The rest is all moot, as we journalists say."

"Well," she said, "you journalists can call it moot if you like, but I’m still going to file it with all the others."

"File it?"

"That’s right, file it! I have a folder full of such nonsense right here on the floor beside my chair, and this one will make a nice addition."

I didn’t like the sound of that. "Just what do you have in there?" I asked.
She shuffled through some papers. "Here’s one," she said. "Tell me if you recognize it." She read the following:

"On July 7, 1861, Longfellow thrilled a large audience in the Boston Garden Arena with his stirring rendition of "The Song of Hiawatha," delivered in a clear tenor voice. He sang all four verses, and was accompanied by his wife on the drums. It was just two days later that the poet lost his fanny in a tragic fire.”
 

She groaned, "Longfellow sang ‘The Song of Hiawatha,’ and lost his FANNY in a fire? That’s not journalism, that’s just plain foolishness!"

"Let me see that," I said. I read the portion she’d circled in the clipping, and then it was clear what had happened. "Well, I just forgot to capitalize ‘Fanny.’ Fanny was his wife." I told her I thought she was trivializing a tragedy of Greek proportions.

"Okay then, Sophocles," she said. "I’ll pick one at random. What about this?" She read:

"Kevin and Barbara spent their honeymoon on Dromedary Island off the coast of Spain, where every October thousands of the majestic beasts paddle ashore to molt, build their nests, lay eggs, and nurse their young until the following spring. Of the two major camel species, only the dromedary is migratory. The timid apothecary rarely ventures outside its home territory in the foothills of Spain’s Eldorado Mountains just west of Seville.”

"Eldorado Mountains west of Seville? I’m surprised you didn’t throw ‘Fleetwood’ in there, somewhere! What entered your mind when you wrote that?" she asked.

"Oh, nothing much. I guess I thought those little details would help make the column more interesting. Some readers are fascinated by science and nature, you know."

"Well, camels do not migrate, or molt, or lay eggs, for that matter!"

"I know that. I was only speaking metaphorically. A metaphor is a literary device that–"

"Literary device? Here’s a literary device for you!" She read another quote:

"In his later years, Benjamin Franklin rubbed a Burmese cat against his breeches every night before going to bed, believing that the static electricity would help his goat.”

"That’s a ridiculous sentence. How in the world would static electricity be of any help to Franklin’s goat, assuming he even had one?" I could see her point. She handed the clipping to me.

I read the sentence carefully, turned it upside down and sideways, and then it came to me. "AHA," I exclaimed. "Franklin was treating his ‘gout,’ not his ‘goat.’ Aside from that minor misspelling, it’s an excellent sentence. It has all the necessary fragments, including a solid suppository subject, a compound predicament and even a consumptive clause, with a cat thrown in for good measure. You could diagram it ten times and never find a thing wrong with it. I’m proud of that sentence!"

"Then how about this?" She read another:

"In the early 20th Century, when American oil reserves were still plentiful, petroleum jelly on toast was served at breakfast tables throughout the Midwest.”
 

I told her to put her folder away. She obviously wasn’t interested in learning anything; she just wanted to annoy me. "By the way," I asked, "why are you saving those clippings?"

"I think they’ll come in handy if there’s ever a competency hearing," she replied.
Somebody, I believe it was either Shakespeare or H. Ross Perot, said "A prophet is without honor in his own living room."

I concur, unanimously.