POSTING # 19

Virgil Dandelions; Words, Words, Words; Short Stuff (Mini-Stories about Kids and Pets)

Virgil Dandelions

The parks in Virgil have gone ‘green’ (no herbicides), which means in fact that they are now yellow (lots of dandelions).

When I was young, no one fussed about dandelions.

But then the chemical age began. It became possible to have dandelion-free lawns with little work. Just spray on a chemical, sit back and watch the dandelions wilt.

Of course, we have since learned that the chemical sprays were a deal with the devil.

What to do about the dandelions?

Consultants, like myself, glibly say that one should see a problem as an opportunity.

What are the opportunities?

Well, there is dandelion wine, and this IS wine-growing country.

I have made wines from fruit (a quite respectable ‘Bordeaux’ from peaches and blueberries) and even from vegetables (an undrinkable ‘Chardonnay’ from green tomatoes) but I have never made dandelion wine.

I have tried some made by other people. The colour was attractive but it was always so sweet that I wanted to rinse my mouth out with cold spring water and lemon juice.

A recipe I saw said that a drinkable dandelion wine was possible if one used grape juice as the sweetener instead of white sugar. But why not leave out the dandelions and just make grape wine?

And then there are dandelion greens.

When we were young, my mother read an article saying that dandelion greens were full of vitamins and minerals. She made a salad with the greens and put it on the table without telling us what it was. The oil-free, sweet and sour dressing was delicious but the leaves looked strange. Then one of us realized what they were. We rebelled, saying that worms crawled over dandelion leaves.

Mom started to say something---perhaps that worms also crawled over lettuce leaves--- but quickly thought better of it.

Our rebellion may have been a good thing. What Mom’s article didn’t say was that dandelion greens have strong diuretic properties (a fact recognized by the French whose name for dandelions is ‘pis-en-lit’).

Wet beds were the last thing that Mom needed as she tried to cope with three boys.

Perhaps we will have to turn the clock back and just not fuss about dandelions.


Words, Words, Words

As I was thinking about our family’s stories, I realized that many of them have to do with words---their pronunciation, meaning, or translation.

Here are a few of our ‘word’ stories:

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My family likes to tease me about my pronunciation of Lake Huron. Unless I catch myself, my pronunciation suggests that the lake is full of a warm, yellowish body fluid.

Definitely, not something you would want to swim in!

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When we were young we would tease Mom about her pronunciation of Washington. She added an ‘r’, so the word became Warshington.

Mom would say, “I do not say Warshington”

She would pause, getting her tongue and brain synchronized, “I say Warshington”.

Being mean kids, we would say, “But you are still saying ‘Warshington’.

“No, I’m not.”


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Perhaps genetically wonky synapses would explain the pronunciation problems Mom had and I have.

Which reminds me of the problem some Asian persons have with the letters ‘r’ and ‘l’.

There is a story I heard from a colleague in the Foreign Service. A diplomat who had been posted in Ottawa was told that he would be appointed Ambassador to Washington. He was pleased to be offered this very responsible position. And he was also happy to be leaving Ottawa, where the Government had recently been defeated, a polling date had been set and the politicians were starting their usual shenanigans of charges and counter charges that meant an increased workload for public servants.

When he arrived in Washington, he made the usual round of calls, introducing himself to other ambassadors.

Trying to find a subject for conversation, the ambassador from an Asian country, said, “You have a erection”.

The Canadian, looking down at his trousers, started to say, “No I don’t…..” when he realized what the ambassador was trying to say.

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A memo from a British official of the World Bank in Moscow had a sentence, “We will have to make sure that the Russians stop prevaricating”. From the context of the memo it was clear that the World Bank person was concerned about delays that were taking place. I assumed that the author had confused ‘procrastinate’ and ‘prevaricate’, as people sometimes do with words that have similar sounds, such as ‘militate’ and ‘mitigate.”

I drafted a short email note, gently chiding the author and was about to send it when something told me I should check.

I looked in an American dictionary and according to it, ‘prevaricate’ meant to lie.

Then, to be absolutely sure, I checked the Oxford Dictionary. The entry showed ‘lie’ but also said that the word could mean ‘postpone or delay’.

I scrapped the email.

A close call!

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During part of our stay in London, we had a wonderfully helpful and pleasant French au pair who had come to England to learn English. She had a girl friend who worked for a English woman who had gone to a well-known girls school. Whenever the two French girls got together, the English women would try to make sure that our au pair was learning English and not ‘Canadian’.

One day our au pair told the woman that she had learned something new from us. Our refrigerator had stopped working and we had told her that ‘we were going to get it fixed’.

The woman told her that the expression was incorrect. We should have said that ‘we were going to get it repaired’. She explained that in proper English, the word ‘fix’ meant to attach something to something else, for example one could talk about ‘fixing’ a set of shelves to the wall.

Our au pair told us what the woman had said.

We agreed that she was right, that in England people used ‘repair’ rather than ‘fix’ in that context, but that in Canada (and North America generally) one could use either ‘fix’ or ‘repair’ when talking about a broken appliance, car etc.

Our au pair’s ambition was to become a flight attendant for Air France on their North Atlantic flights. She just grinned and said she would use ‘fix’.

(She joined Air France when she returned to France and after training on the airline’s domestic routes was assigned to the North Atlantic flights. She visited us from time to time after we returned to Canada.)

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The family and I were in a Quebec City restaurant for breakfast. The server spoke only French and our French was pretty rudimentary. We got by with a lot of pointing at items on the menu.

I wanted some decaffeinated coffee and decided I had enough French to ask for that. I created a sentence in French that ending by asking if I could have ‘un Sanka’.

The server said, in French, that she wasn’t sure whether they could serve any before noon. I asked why and she said she would talk to the manager. She came back and said that they couldn’t serve that before noon.

The mystery sorted itself out when the bill came. I saw that the server had written down ‘un cinquante’, and then crossed it out. She thought I wanted a Labatt 50, a beer that was very popular in Quebec at the time.

Sanka and cinquante---pretty close.

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Queen’s Politics Professor J.A. Corry, liked to tell this story about President Truman, who was known as a blunt-spoken person.

Apparently, the President’s daughter, Margaret, complained to her mother, Bess, about her father’s frequent use of the word ‘manure’. It was embarrassing, and Bess should get him to stop using it.

Bess sighed and said, “It took me twenty years to get him to say ‘manure’.

Short Stuff (Mini-Stories about Kids and Pets)

We were at home and I was cleaning up the garage with the help of a child. As I was tidying things, the child picked up a paint can and shook it. Hearing paint slosh around in it he said, “Wa-wa”, the two-year-old’s version of ‘water’.

“No,” I said, “It’s paint”.

Another shake of the can and the child contradicted old Dad, “No, wa-wa”

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In London, we lived next door to our doctor, a kindly but taciturn fellow.

One Sunday morning, there was a phone call from him, “Your child is eating green apples off the ground in your back garden---just thought I would save myself a trip.”

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See you next Sunday for Posting #20 with more stories from our family’s universe! If you have comments or suggestions, please leave a comment at the bottom of this posting, or email me at johnpathunter@cs.com.