Some people, believe it or not, like semantic arguments.
My friend Cara is one of these people, whose brains sort of open up a little more from semantic dickering, or like who see semantic dickering not as idiotic quests at being Right but rather as quick and fun investigations that yield certain small truths.
Behold:
Notes from a Hospital Waiting Room
I had never thought of a bulletin board in a hospital waiting room as a genre until I saw it violated. The HWRBB in question had some reasonable features, including:
• photos of smiling fellows and staff
• a construction paper palm tree
• a construction paper castleBut there was also a construction paper plane, trailing a banner that read:
When you spread out your small intestine, it can be longer than a tennis court!
I mean, no. When one begins to read this banner, one fully – fully! – expects an inspirational thing like When you spread your wings and fly, there’s no telling what you can do! There is nothing inspirational about spreading out your small intestine; if anything, this is something we should discourage. Seriously, when? This is EXACTLY why we invented if.
I can understand wanting a neat fact on the HWRBB, but the proper format is on white paper inside a dark blue construction paper square. Infants are born with this knowledge. I have seen many airplane banners, and they are nearly always advertising. It is possible that a deranged heiress could hire a plane to drag an inspirational message across the sky. But it is completely unrealistic to think that anyone would hire a plane to tell us about the small intestine even if there were an amazing sale going on in there.
My favorite thing about this is that it’s awesome, like much of Cara’s relatively new blog, The Mereological Report. It’s a thing you should bookmark/rss.