Weekly Rumination2

I’ve got a confession to make. I was born and raised in Salt Lake City, so I grew up in a household where there was no drinking, smoking, and cursing. Now, one can only live like that for so long before something’s gotta give, and sure enough, friends and family got together and there was an intervention. I started attending meetings and now I’m on day 666; so, I guess I can’t deny it anymore. My name is Emery, and I’m…a prude!

Prudes are the ones who walk into a movie theater, then march back out due to the excessive nudity in films like Bambi. You know, the animals in Disney’s Robin Hood wore clothes. I don’t know why Bambi couldn’t have worn some Bermuda shorts or jodhpurs with riding boots- that would’ve been classy.

One thing I’ve learned from attending Prudes Anonymous meetings is that I’m not alone. Those meetings are chock full of other sweater-vest-wearing, minced oath mumblers who are never bored. I mean how can we be when we analyze everything anybody says? Obviously, I’d never tell people about their grammatical mistakes to their face, because I’m polite; which I guess makes me a bi-p, a polite prude.

Mispronunciations, grammatical errors, tongue slips…no, Freudian twists…no, tongue slips trips and falls. Hang on, Freudian water, twisted sister, mother tongue of Freud…oh yea, Freudian slips; that’s it. Should there have been ellipses and a semicolon in that last sentence? How about the hyphen between bi and p? Why is jodhpurs spelled that way? I always have to Google that word. Why am I so comma and semicolon happy? Why do I spend so much time in PA meetings debating whether twelve (aka 12) steps should be spelled out in letters or in numbers? When will this paragraph end? Ok, ok, turns out, I’m a trip; I mean tri-p. A polite, pedantic prude. So there ya’ go. Anyone else ready to admit they have a problem?

~ Emery Lamb