#301 Miss-Shapen

I’m kind of surprised sometimes by Word. Not words plural but Word, the program. It presumes to tell me when my sentences are overly wordy yet it fails me time after time when I’m looking for a quick synonym. As most people who use Word know, when you position your cursor over a word and right click it, a little menu will appear on the screen with a list of possible synonyms for that word. Unless, of course, you’ve misspelled it, then a list of possible correct spellings will come up, unless you’ve really misspelled it bad, in which case an empty window comes up with nothing, kind of the windows equivalent of a shrug. Or possibly, if the word occurs in a sentence which has a green squiggly line under it, Word will ignore your request for a synonym until you’ve taken care of your fragment or your wordiness or god forbid, your passive voice. Word has a real thing when the passive voice has been used. Still, synonym-ally it’s quite deficient, or perhaps prejudiced. Right click under the word synonym for instance, and it tells you to check the thesaurus. Or perhaps it’s just saying that the thesaurus is a place I should check for synonyms. But yesterday, when I was writing about tarts and prostitutes, I thought I would check the word prostitute for a synonym, just to make sure tart came up. Nope. Word has no list of synonyms for prostitute. Nor Whore. I checked the word tart. A long list of synonyms for tart: Pie, tartlet, pastry, quiche, or sharp, bitter, acid. No saucy wenches there. So I begin to detect a G-rating system to Word’s instant synonym bank. Type in the word fox and synonym-isize it and you get deceive, trick, hoodwink, bamboozle, and not a hot chick in the bunch. Much less hottie or hunk or babe. Bill Gates, the secret prude. This window is through a glass darkly.
I had a normal upbringing with regular not too prudish but not swinging parents. So my prude quotient is about middle of the road, I guess. But I remember coming home once with a new cologne on. Teenagers are the worst when it comes to drenching themselves with stinkwater. My mom said I smelled like a French whorehouse. I was somewhat taken aback. The next year I came home from college, where I’d been living off campus with some roommates. They had taught me to cook a breakfast dish called by the odd name toad-in-the-hole or toat-in-the whole. Basically, you rip a circular hole out of the center of a piece of bread, put it in a frying pan with sizzling butter then crack an egg into the hole. Fry it, flip it and serve with jam. I showed my mom and she said “tote-in-the-hole? You mean whorehouse eggs.” So these many years later I finally have the courage to ask myself. Why did my mom know so much about houses of ill repute? What’s a synonym for warped?
America, ya gotta love it.