In Plain Engel-ish

I’ve been thinking a lot this past week — for reasons that will soon become apparent — of my first car trip outside the United States. I was only nineteen in 1967 when my older cousin and I crossed the border into Canada so we could join the throng of sixty-four million (!) visitors who were headed to “Canada Expo 67” that was held on Notre Dame Island in Montreal, Quebec.  My parents were wary of letting me go with my cousin Ron, who was only a year older, on such a long drive where we also had to experience...

It was a few years ago that a new spice shop opened near where I lived here in Raleigh. For the first month, the owner was giving tastings of their most popular spices and requesting that customers rank their favorites. I was asked to choose between two kinds of salts: one very coarse sea salt and the other an unusually tangy, vinegar salt. I liked the vinegary one best. “So,” the overly jolly owner replied with a wink that was a bit too pronounced, “you’re putting the Tart before the Coarse!” I get a kick out of bad punning as...

Mark your calendars! It turns out that in 2037, for the first time, the world’s population will reach nine billion people. Rumor has it that the earth’s nine billionth person will be born on June 26th at noon in Lizard Lick, North Carolina. Well, that last sentence might need a little fact-checking.  But it’s good news that this will also be the first time that the earth’s population growth is actually slowing. It took only twelve years to grow from seven to eight billion (from 2010 to 2022), but it will take fifteen years to grow from eight to nine...

I felt that I had a slight advantage when I went to my first wine tasting on my twenty-first birthday (my thinking: why wait one day more?). After all, I was that rare young adult who’d had family experiences with drinking wine since my childhood. Growing up Jewish, I’d been given a little bit of wine on Passover since elementary school. Tragically, though, the only wine that had ever whetted my palate was Manischewitz Blackberry. For those of you who have never indulged, let’s just say that Manischewitz has a bouquet of children’s cough syrup and tastes like good fruit...

Early next year (February 12 to be exact), I shall be writing my 100th essay for you. I began in March of 2020, due to the start of Covid, and I have faithfully placed a new essay in your inbox biweekly ever since. And, hey, what’s with my beloved English language when the adverb “biweekly” can mean either “once every other week” OR “twice a week”? I suppose it’s not a dangerous language flaw, until, that is, your doctor tells you that you must continue to take your black-widow-spider antidote “biweekly,” and you think he meant “once every other week”—...