still life with spell-check and a banana

August 23, 2004 04:20 PM

My favorite exchange today (oh hell, my favorite in several days):

Me: “Hi. Could I get an iced coffee to go, and…um…a banana, please?”

Coffee guy (fusses around, gets coffee, takes money, etc.): “Here you go. And you can choose your own banana. Because that’s just the kind of people we are here.”

Me: “Everyone should have the freedom to choose their own banana.”

Coffee guy and coffee girl who is also behind the counter: (laugh)

In other exciting developments, a few of my favorite spell check suggestions:

Saddam: Sadism

OBL (as in Osama bin Laden): OBI (as in Obi-Wan)

And also,

Chipotle: Shippable. Yeah, those are really close. Good call, spell-check!

And…I’m out. Slow news day, what can I say.

quote to go:

“I don’t see any use in spelling a word right—and never did. I mean I don’t see any use in having a uniform and arbitrary way of spelling words. We might as well make all clothes alike and cook all dishes alike. Sameness is tiresome; variety is pleasing. I have a correspondent whose letters are always a refreshment to me; there is such a breezy, unfettered originality about his orthography. He always spells ‘kow’ with a large ‘K.’ Now that is just as good as to spell it with a small one. It is better. It gives the imagination a broader field, a wider scope. It suggests to the mind a grand, vague, impressive new kind of a cow.”

—Mark Twain

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