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Letters From North America
by Peary Perry

Being something of a word person, I’m always looking around for weird words for their definitions and how they relate to our daily lives. What I really like are words that have very specific meanings and can’t be confused with anything other than what they are. For example, the word excruciating means ‘extremely painful’. It isn’t easily confused with anything else. It sounds and means painful. Nothing else that I know of can be mistaken for this word. Lots of words have lots of meanings and can be easily mistaken for something else. I was told once that the Eskimos have 25 or so words for snow. It must be extremely confusing to know what kind of snow they are talking about. Like what’s the word for yellow snow? Another of my favorite words is perdition. Now for those of you that haven’t heard this before, I’ll give you the definition. It’s the “State of final spiritual ruin or the loss of the soul”. In other words what I call the big …”Oops”. Someone explained it to me once that it was the time between dying and realizing that there is a Heaven and a Hell. Not a happy place to be if you ask me. Anyway, how does that lead up to today’s discussion? Well, it’s simple, there are things in our lives for which there aren’t any words and I think there should be. #1. When you pour a soft drink into a glass and you get it to the top, what’s the name of the time while you are waiting and hoping it doesn’t run over? You know the time when the foam bubbles up and over the top but doesn’t run over the side because it’s held in place by surface tension. What’s the name for that? Give me a name for the time when we wake up in the morning about 6 minutes before the alarm goes off. Obviously we don’t have time to get back to sleep and yet we don’t want to rush out of bed either. That 6-minute interim should have a name of some sort. Speaking of beds, raise your hands if you’ve ever woke up during the night because its turned cold and you lay there for an long time thinking that you should get up and get a blanket, but you don’ t because you know it’s colder outside the covers than it is inside, so you lay there and suffer and try to go back to sleep but you really know that you can’t since you’re too cold. Doesn’t make any sense does it? What name could we give to this? Maybe we’re secretly hoping someone else will get up first and either get a blanket or turn the heat on for us. Gas in your car presents another opportunity for a new word. Here you are driving along and you look down at the gauge and realize that you are about out of gas. It’s
late at night and you are in between towns. You think to yourself that maybe you have a better chance if you went back 15 miles to the service station you saw that was open, or do you chance it and drive 15 miles to the next town and hope you’ll find something open when you get there. The real decision for you is whether or not you can make it to the big town that’s 25 miles ahead of you on what gas you’ve got left in your tank. We’ve all done this; you automatically shut everything down and get into the emergency mode. No air-conditioning, no driving over 55 miles per hour. No radio? Why do we shut the radio off when we think we’re about to run out of gas? It doesn’t run on gas, Maybe we think it taken extra juice to run the alternator or something. But we all do it, don’t we? No talking, talking causes us to lose our concentration and thus the 25 miles we have to go until we see the all night station sign seems like 500 to everyone in the car. Another thing, ever notice how no one, I mean no one has to stop to go the bathroom when you are running on fumes and trying to make it to the station? Another big oops is when you put hot sauce on something and you kind of overdo it. Then you sit there and think to yourself…’What am I going to do?” You can’t scrape it off that $15.00 piece of meat and yet, you know in your heart of hearts that you have just screwed up by throwing all of that stuff onto a perfectly good piece of steak. Too late to send it back to the kitchen and claim that it’s burnt, they can see the red stuff you’ve dumped on there. Can’t fool them. You just have to grin and bear it whether you like it or not. Hot sauce is kind of like fertilizer; it’s often hard to know how little or how much to put on something. I’ve burned up my share of yards in my time because I opened the little
deally- whopper spreader too far and performed a scorched earth action on my beautiful lawn. My motto has been, if 1 pound per 1,000 square feet is good, then 10 pounds ought to be 10 times better. Trust me, this isn’t the way it works. On the other hand I don’t have many bugs. In fact I don’t have many of anything. Looks like the desert. Nice though. If you like this stuff, e-mail me at www.pearyperry.com. If you have negative thoughts or no thoughts, leave me alone I can’t deal with rejection this week. 

For questions or comments, please contact me at pperry@austin.rr.com