Where have all the flowers gone?

No one uses corn holders anymore.
Those little plastic or ceramic, possibly wood or silver plate (sterling would conduct the heat) pokey things, usually two-pronged, that one would stick into each end of an ear of corn. By holding onto the holders, one would avoid being burned by hot corn-on-the-cob. Particularly good for protecting the tender fingers of children – although the holders did have a way of slipping out of the corn, plopping onto the plate, lap or floor, and causing feelings of failure in children and ire in adults. When use of corn holders was successful, one could also easily roll the ear of corn over a stick of butter without getting grease on one’s fingers.

Another method of buttering one’s corn is to spread the butter on a piece of bread, then hold on to an unbuttered part of the piece of bread and move the buttered part of the bread along the length of the ear of corn, turning the ear with the other hand so it would receive evenly distributed butter. For some reason I believe that this method was developed in the mid-West, from whence all sorts of clever uses of sliced white bread originate.

Or, melt butter and delicately pour the viscous liquid over the ear with one hand while turning the ear with the other, to assure even distribution.

Then salt the ear, using a similar turning method.

No one uses those corn holders anymore.
I don’t know if that means that fingers have become less sensitive to heat (in a way contrary to the fact that the earth seems to be heating up), whether the holders became too costly for any sane person to spend a single cent on such an item, or… I can’t imagine why people stopped using them. Maybe some people never did.

My own ear-of-corn-eating method is that I use no salt or butter. I just wait a couple of minutes until the fresh-out-of-the-pot of boiling water ear of corn cools off just enough for me to pick it up gingerly with my bare naked fingers, and have at it.

Do you start to eat an ear of corn at the left end, the right end (possibly the favored direction of Hebrew-readers) or in the middle? I wonder what a study of this behavior would prove about each group. I start in the middle and choose to think it is because I believe in equality.

No one uses grapefruit spoons anymore, either.
Pointy spoons with serrated edges on both sides so that one doesn’t need to use a knife to cut all around each segment of a half- grapefruit in order to remove it from the rind. Time consuming and potentially exhausting. Each individual grapefruit eater can just insert the pointy, serrated-edged spoon along the rind edge of the half grapefruit, and scoop out the segment, ready to slide into one’s mouth, juice and all. Voila! BEWARE: the serrated edges CAN treat your lips, tongue et al the same way it treats the grapefruit when removing the segment from it’s rind, a potential side-effect of segment-extraction and subsequent consumption with this particular tool.

The other problem with all this is that I have no idea about the proper use of hyphens, as is clearly demonstrated in this piece of writing. I therefore predict, with some sense of inevitability and certainty, that hyphens with no spaces between words will go the way of the corn-holder and the grapefruit spoon. They will, of course, still be used to break up words between syllables when defining words and explaining correct pronunciation, or at the end of a line of type if the line is too short to accommodate the entire word.

In any event, the auto-break setting on computers has pretty much eradicated that particular use of hyphens which is another reinforcement of my prediction that soon hyphenation will go the way of the corn-holder and grapefruit spoon (which doesn’t seem to require a hyphen. This makes “grapefruit spoon” a trail blazing combination of words and an early adapter of the no-hyphen world view.)

Tedious reading, isn’t this?
I do, however, feel that obsolescence of any sort is worth a good deal of ink. If for no other reason than preserving historic curiosities. Had more been written about the art created by using human hair - a Victorian specialty - I might have become a famous human hair painter. Or not. But I would have had the choice.

Let’s not even start a conversation about the use of commas.
Such a conversation – like hitting “Reply All” to an email – can never result in a happy ending.
(Note my use of hyphens above. I think, in this case, I could have more properly used dashes. Em or en? And how do they differ from hyphens? Discuss.)

The entire topic is fraught. I do believe that texting and other short forms of current communication have sounded the death knell of ALL punctuation. Also contributing to this is the fact that on most small-device screens, one has to toggle from the alphabet screen to the punctuation screen, a time-wasting annoyance.

We’ll also save spelling for another day, along with capitalization, bolding and italicizing, and the ever-bothersome parenthetical phrase. This is quite enough punctuation discussion for an ordinary Sunday.

Now I need to get back to my gardening and cooking – NORMAL activities for an ordinary Sunday. (By the way, I don’t garden. I buy pots of flowers. This is because I dislike getting dirt – or anything else – under my nails. Call me crazy. And don’t tell me to wear gloves because I sincerely believe that if one is a serious gardener one must, as is part and parcel of the beloved activity, enjoy getting dirt under one’s nails. And kneeling, sitting in dirt, and/or crouching – three other things I don’t particularly enjoy. A gardener not wanting dirt under their nails would be like a ballerina not wanting ugly feel as the result of squeezing size 8 feet into size 6 point shoes. It comes with the activity. Ya gotta take the good with the bad. I don’t garden.)

Now that you’re all crying “uncle!” I will stop.
basta Basta BASTA!!!!!

PS: I don’t see the exclamation point dying anytime soon. It’s become shorthand for expressing happiness, silliness, dis-belief, wonder and “just kidding” by using a heiroglyphic-y visual, rather than actual words. It can be a delivery mechanism for deception. But… it works. I mean: It works!!!!

PS: Holy smoke: I forgot about ellipses! And “PS”! SO much work to do,
so little public interest…

Perhaps I should pick a few flowers from my potted garden and sit down with a nice ear of corn on the cob, and ponder all this. Or not…