Day 34: In Memory of William Safire

I'm a shoe whore or, as my kids would say, a shoe ho. They both sound like shoe horn, one of which, I now recall, my dad always had on his dresser along with the aforementioned hickory nuts and repulsive licorice candy. I've never been able to figure out why you need a shoe horn to get on a shoe. If you've bought the correct size, what's the problem? My dad wore garters to hold up his socks: again, slightly confusing. Isn't that what the elastic ribbing is for?

Anyway... Oh my, I shouldn't be using that word anymore, even though I love it -- it's exactly what I mean! And yet today I saw the results of a poll done to determine which conversational words the American public considers most annoying. Whatever took top honors, followed by you know, it is what it is, anyway, and at the end of the day. Stop right there! I don't see the word like on that list. The people being polled (the pollees?) clearly don't eat dinner with teenagers every night.

I'm not talking about using like as a verb, as in "I like Sugar Babies" or "I only like the tips of asparagus."; I'm talking about "Like, like, oh man, it was so, like, sick dude." Is it, like, a modifier? Who knows, you know? Whatever it is, my kids' conversations are positively littered with it. On certain evenings I beep each time one of them says it (an interjection, I do believe, or perhaps just an interruption); it ends up sounding like the Long Island Expressway at rush hour, people just sitting on their horns -- HONNKKKK! And they still don't stop. They tell me I'm being annoying. Fine (my friend K's pet peeve word), whatever.

Gross is the word that my mom hated. Every now and then, later in her life, she'd say something was gross, but it just didn't sound right coming out of her mouth. It sounded kind of gross. "Gross me out, Loretta!" my friend N, who grew up in the South, would say. When my mom wanted to treat me to something -- perhaps a chocolate ice cream soda -- she'd exclaim, "I'll blow you to it!" As a young adult, I used that expression a few times myself until I noticed strange looks on people's faces. My dad used the word bunk, as in "That's a lotta bunk!" (nicer, I guess, than b.s.). And if he didn't feel well he'd say he felt punk. J was feeling kind of punk today after getting a flu shot.

Anyway (I refuse to give it up), today's urbandictionary.com word of the day was shoe whore. One of the definitions was "Like a bag hag but obsessed with shoes." Dude, that's like, so cool: I'm a shoe ho as well as a bag hag!

Of course, at the end of the day, it is what it is.