#1200 Doh-Nut

Not long ago I pulled into work. And as I got out of my car, this heavenly smell wafted into my nostrils. Ah, I thought, the new doughnut place is finally open. Because the smell was from the rich olfactory stimulators of burned fat and sugar.
Why is it the things that are worst for us smell so good? They go right to our most corruptest genes. Like we’re hard-wired for gustatory abandon and heading to coronary hell on a road of deep-fried indulgences.
Talk about original sin.
Smell a burger or French Fries frying, it thrills you to the core. Drive by a doughnut shop in the morning, your stomach growls like a wild animal. And don’t even get me going on the smell of freshly frying bacon. Combine frying and smoked pork products, someone buy me a prepaid gift card to the cardiologist...
The common spelling for doughnut now seems to be d-o-n-u-t-. In the old days, we actually spelled out the dough part. D-o-u-g-h-. But like spelling the “through” in drive-through t-h-r-u- we seem to have got lazy, either with our word processing or our sign makers. Maybe sign makers charge by the letter and d-o- donuts is just cheaper.
But doing the d-o- in donuts can make people unfamiliar with English pronounce it doo-nuts, as in Dudley Do-Right, so there’s a risk. Doo-nuts sounds a little like a doo-doo version of horse apples so you got to be careful.
Even with the original spelling I have trouble. I get the dough part. Doughnuts are, after all, deep-fried dough. But what twist of the imagination made the original word coiner call the result “nuts.” I’ve seen nuts on doughnuts, but I’ve never confused the taste of doughnuts with the flavor of any nut I’ve ever had the pleasure to savor.
Maybe it’s a behavioral nuts. Like when I smelled the doughnuts frying, my brain went “doh!” At the time, I thought to myself maybe that’s why we call them doh-nuts. They make you go “doh!” like Homer Simpson.
And by making you want to eat something sinfully delicious and bad for you, they make you go nuts like a Homer too.
America, ya gotta love it.