Friday, December 23, 2005

EATS, SHOOTS AND LEAVES (With Due Apologies To Ms. Truss)

Ever suffer from foot-in-mouth disease? I have a chronic case of it and my friends seem to get the worst of it. Here’s a sampler from the other day – one bite and I promptly blurted out that the brownie my friend spent hours slaving over was simply “awful” and I really had meant “awesome”!
A friend of mine insists that all my slips are classic Freudian. Recently, I got myself into sour soup by missing out on punctuation between two words. That may seem minor enough, but when a sentence goes something like 'you won't catch the flu by sharing a meal off a loo seat, shaking hands… (Oops! see how important the comma suddenly seems?).

My friend's still upset with me, and I'm pretty sure she's thinking I'm some whacked-out, no-good bitch with a smart mouth that needs to be flushed out with carbolic soap or something worse. Then of course, there's the 'I-know-but-I'm-not-supposed-to-spill’ syndrome. This one has me really anxious as it gets me into the most trouble.

I forget I'm supposed to know or not know that I know, or know that I do not know... err ...you get the picture. You’d rather not tell me stuff till you're pretty much ready to broadcast it to the world. (That was a hard confession to make, believe me.) And to top it I'm really bad at keeping a straight face, so in case you want to throw that surprise birthday party, guess what, surprise me too!

Now, I know what you’re thinking. Or do I? Well you better not tell me. If it’s any consolation, I’ve decided to acknowledge punctuation. I wish to respect the full stop, the comma and the apostrophes and appreciate its essentially poignant or keenly distressing effects. (You don’t believe me do you? You forget that I’m capable of surprises too.)

6 comments:

Rajesh Rajoo said...

You got that right about me not believing you. How'd you guess?

IdeaSmith said...

Lol....blurry good start. And I believe you, like i've believed all the nutty-but-more-amazingly-true-than-Ripley things you've come out with in all these years!

Anonymous said...

although a lot of brouhaha is often made about the importance of the all important punctuation in the writ word i wonder if our phonetics inflect said grammar on an everyday basis for example when a bout of verbal diarrhoea comes on during an attack of foot in mouth disease can you really catch flu sharing a meal off a loo seat among other things actually a competent pedantic would be able to argue that to great effect im told

Unknown said...

tweed: you wouldn't happen to be said pedantic, would you?

Anonymous said...

sense, if I were to spell anal, I'd probably write M-E

Unknown said...

Tweed: Lol! wonder how you'd punctuate it! You got a blog? I'm tempted to visit it!:D