I hate to travel. Nevertheless, here I am, about to hit the road again, headed for the third time this year to Wisconsin. Don’t get me wrong: I like cheese, but this is ridiculous. Anyway, I haven’t much time this morning. I could just as well have skipped blogging today, but for a matter that has been weighing heavily on my mind lately.
Summer is here. You will no doubt be indulging in summeryish refreshments, many of them frozen. I’m an ice cream man, myself. You’re welcome to go with all those frozen substitutes that lend the illusion that you’re watching your weight, but you’re only fooling yourself, and missing out on frozen desserts as God created them in the Garden. Oh well, whatever; comme ci comme ça, I suppose. Anyway, on to the essential point. As you eat your ice cream substitute, be aware that there are people all around you — well, there’s at least one of us them, anyway — who have for years been tolerating ignorance as well as they can, but have almost reached the breaking point. They are on the verge of one of those disgruntled-postal-worker rampages, and all it will take to set them off is the utterance of one word:
sherbert
It’s sherbet. Not sherbert, and certainly not — saints and angels preserve us! — sherbert ice cream.
Sherbet. Not sherbert, not ice cream. Practice it: shər-bĕt shər-bĕt shər-bĕt. Like it’s a shər-bĕt that, Favre or no Favre, the Vikings are never going to the Superbowl. Like it’s a shər-bĕt that Obama will want more of your money tomorrow, and it’s a shər-bĕt that there will never be anything to show for it. Like it’s a shər-bĕt that someone will want to correct my conflation of “sure” and “shər-,” and it’s a shər-bĕt that I will bless them for it.
Sherbet.
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4 Comments:
#1 || 10·06·11··08:18 || Daniel
I totally thought you were going to go with "hermit". I had the window opened just a couple of inches high, and was scrolling through it, and though you were describing yourself as someone who doesn't go out much etc. I totally was shocked by the ice cream substitute tangent..
#2 || 10·06·11··09:21 || Kim in ON
Amen, brother.
I am so impressed that your phonetic description of the word included the schwa sound. I don't know how to make diacritical symbols with my keyboard like that.
Personally, when I eat a frozen treat in the summer, I figure I may as well enjoy it, and I get something really fattening.
#3 || 10·06·11··14:11 || rebecca
My mother would have loved you. Hearing people say sherbERt was her very favorite pet peeve because she loved nothing more than giving her sherbert/sherbet speech.
#4 || 10·06·11··20:13 || David
Kim,
I don’t know how to do it with the keyboard, either. I do know how to do it with html entities. The schwa, however, I just copy-and-pasted from the online dictionary.
You Canadians! It’s almost a shər-bĕt that not a single U.S. American comes to my defense.
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