It started with a completely innocent comment. I swear.
First of all, I should tell you that I have this terrible (wonderful?) habit of mashing words together. I caught the bug a few years ago when some guy friends of mine joined a fantasy football league and kept referring to it as “mantasy football.” From then on, I saw every pair of words as an opportunity for word play. Buffalos in Yellowstone laying idly about became “loaffalos” and “blogurt” is the only logical term for the unfortunate condition resulting from over-consumption of frozen yogurt (ahem, completely hypothetical of course). Yes sir. Just call me Queen of the Frankenwords. All hail me!
Ragù alla Bolognese (a la Heston Blumenthal)
Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens,
Bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens…
The summer I was 11 years old, my sister and I overdosed on The Sound of Music. Oh no, I don’t mean we watched it multiple times over a few sunny months. What I mean is that we actually watched it every(!) single(!) afternoon(!) for the entire summer vacation.
Both of us had just finished our first semesters in American schools, having moved from Hong Kong over winter break. I remember starting sixth grade in my all-girls, sort-of-Catholic-but-mostly-in-name-only school on Hong Kong island, surrounded by my Cantonese-speaking friends, and ending sixth grade in a not-all-girls, seriously-Catholic private school in a tiny town in Florida, surrounded by a bunch of non-Cantonese-speaking classmates. To say it was jarring is a slight understatement.
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