I’m Out of Veggibles

Let’s get the fine print out of the way first. Miss Linda (no, that’s not how I’m satisfying the challenge, although, technically, it does count) decided to come back from Japan with a vengeance.

Your Friday prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday is: “miss.”  Use it any way you’d like. Have fun!

I like the way Linda says: “Have fun!” “The floor is littered with broken glass, have fun!” “It snowed last night and the car has four bald tires, have fun!” “Your mother is coming for dinner. I going out and you’re out of beer, have fun!” Surprisingly, when I saw this, I thought that I would have fun. I thought of a whole bunch of ‘miss’ words and those voices in my head were off and streaming. Of course, most of my ‘miss’ words turned out to be ‘mis’ words. Like mistake(s), which I kept making. Misdirect, misinform, miscue and mislead all were lacking that necessary second S. Necessary has two Ss, where I don’t usually expect them. I usually spell it with two Cs and shake my head as Word corrects me again. I’m guessing that Word is shaking its virtual head and thinking “how many times do I have to fix this?”

As we speak, well, I write and you read, Word is trying to fix my title. To which I say:

No, Word, that isn’t a misspelled word. It’s a well-understood word in this house, and it refers to the gummy vitamins that I take every day. Yes, gummies. That’s how I like my vitamins, in gummy form. My wife had been buying and trying (as in trying to get me to take) vitamins for years. For quite some time, I just flat out refused. Vitamins either tasted like chalk or smelled like cat food of were too big to swallow or made me throw up. I could take them with food, but that meant ending a good meal with a lousy taste. I tried, I really did. In fact, it was during one valiant attempt that I misspoke and called them by their new name:

“Hon, where do you keep my veggibles?”

I don’t know why, and I don’t know what it’s supposed to mean. I do know that we had a good laugh and the word has been veggibles ever since.

Late last year, I suggested that if she would buy me gummy veggibles, that I would take them. She refused. Gummies are for children. Then she found adult male gummies. She caved. Better, I guess to have a healthy husband who acts like a child than a husband you have to take care of because he’s always getting sick.

Two of these, each and every day.

These are like candy. I could eat the whole bottle.

I know that veggibles is a mistake, but I want to call it a malapropism. It’s like gummies, I just want to use the word. I’m not sure if veggible sounds enough like vitamin to be considered a malapropism. I know that it isn’t included in the book I received for my birthday: “Going to Hell in a Henbasket” I asked for that book after reading Sammy’s blog series about it. I miss Sammy. She’s still around, but she seems to have taken an extended vacation from blogging. Maybe talking about her will coax her back out into print.

Anyway, back to misspeaking. Veggibles isn’t the only made-up / messed-up word we have around here, and it isn’t the only time aliens trained in the English language would be at a disadvantage when eavesdropping on my wife and me.

Just the other day, we had this little conversation:

“What would you like me to do with the leftover turkey?”

“Do you have the stuff to make the stuff I like?”

“I don’t know if I do.”

The stuff I wanted her to make is a turkey and noodle casserole that I simply love. The stuff that she makes it with is Cream of Celery soup. She didn’t actually have any of that soup, but she said that she had celery and cream, and some other vegetables and vegetable broth, so she could make cream of celery soup.

That was a bit of a mind-bender for me. She had the stuff to make the stuff to make the stuff I like.

Make the stuff?

That’s like making air or making water. You can’t make basic ingredients. That’s like making numbers before doing math. I use that as an example because in some programming languages, numbers are part of a class of immutable objects. They exist, but you can’t mess with them. You can add 1 + 2 to get 3, but you can’t redefine the plus operation, the way 1 gets added to 2, so as to have it work out to be 1 + 2 = 4.

It may not come as a surprise to you to learn that I spent most of my computer programming career working with a language that would let me do that. If I wanted to, I could redefine the ‘+’ operator. I never did, but I liked the fact that I could.

Living with me might be a challenge for my lovely editor, but it’s not mission impossible, she’s got the necessary stuff.