#775 Odds and Ends

As you are aware by now if you’ve been exposed to this column for very long, I have a fascination with words. Sometimes I wonder why we use the ones we do. Sometimes I’m amazed at hidden meanings, sometimes a word’s accidental truth.
Like the other day when I wrote about the guy on the cellphone in the bathroom, or as my friend put it, the stall talker. I like that, it’s like a spoonerism of tall stalker.
Definitely something to be afraid of either way. A tall stalker or a stall talker.
But really, talking on your cellphone while you’re on the toilet is not what the phone company had in mind when they called them anytime minutes.
I had another person react to the article with an eeyew. Strangely, this person was female. Stranger still, when I first encountered the stall talker, I had thought to myself, this is what comes from having women go to the bathroom together. All of a sudden it’s okay for everyone to talk in the toi toi willy nilly.
So I’m reading the paper the other day and an article says some guy has been arrested for “manufacturing pot.” I thought, that’s an odd way to put it, don’t you grow pot? Manufacturing is taking raw materials from different sources and putting them together in a new and novel way.
Originally, it meant with your hands, the “manu” in manufacture coming from the Latin manus, meaning hand.
But that is, in fact, the crime on the books. Growing marijuana is “manufacturing” marijuana—a clever way of using a word to take away the natural and make it mean something more consciously criminal. He wasn’t growing a plant he was manufacturing a drug!
Lastly, in the unconscious bilingual weirdness department, I saw a can of chili recently. It was labeled, “Chili Con Carne with Beans.” “Carne” means meat. “Con” means with. So if we were to render it all in English, the label would read, “chili with meat with beans.”
I always eat mine with cheese with onions.
America, ya gotta love it.