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All sorts of minor questions have accumulated in my
I'll get around to this stuff some day
file, so it
must be time for my annual stint as an advice
columnist.
Dear Ed: I do the Jumbles puzzle in the Post every morning, but sometimes I have the feeling that there is more than one solution.
Dear Jumbler: You should trust your feelings. The Thursday Jumble gave you LINGES, which produces both SINGLE and SLINGE, which means to lounge about -- my favorite activity when I'm not writing computer programs to produce arcane answers like these. Wednesday, they gave you REPACT, an anagram for CARPET, PERACT (to perform) and PREACT (to act before). On April 6, DRAIC generated five answers: ACRID, CAIRD (a tramp or vagrant), CARID (the crustacean family which includes shrimp), DARIC (a gold coin of ancient Persia) and DIRCA (a plant of the mezereon family).
Dear Ed: I'm horrified by Colorado's official
inconsistencies. English is the Official Language, and yet
the Official Flower is the columbine -- and that's a Latin
word which means dove-like.
What can we do about
this?
Dear Horrified: Whoever fancied a resemblance between the bird and the flower must have been eating mushrooms.
Anyway, there is a perfectly good English word for the
flower -- culverwort. Culver
means dove, and it has
a respectable ancestry back to Old English. Aside from
being one step in the making of barley sprouts into beer,
wort
is also a generic term for plants and herbs --
remember the controversy over the lousewort
?
The legislature can make us consistent by changing the
official flower designation from columbine
to
culverwort.
It's still the same plant of the
Aquilegia genus, but it will have an Official English name,
and you can again be proud to be a Coloradan.
Dear Ed: The April 20 gathering of skin-heads, Kluxers, neo-Nazis and other people with IQ's in the high single digits really bothered me. Is there anything we can do about this?
Dear Bothered: I think so, but we'll need the legislature to help. Recall that the NFL decided to move the Super Bowl away from Phoenix because Arizona would not make Martin Luther King's birthday a state holiday. And other groups concerned about civil rights also called for a boycott of Arizona.
This means that people of certain beliefs will avoid states which do not have official holidays which correspond to those beliefs -- i.e., if you believe in racial equality, you will not enter a state which does not celebrate King's birthday.
Thus, if the General Assembly will go on record as saying that April 20, Hitler's birthday, is not and never will be a holiday in Colorado, then the Aryans will decide to boycott Colorado.
While they're at it, our legislators could also declare that Feb. 27 (Bambi's birthday) is not a Colorado holiday, so that the animal-rights activists will stay away. Other good non-holidays would be July 5, the birthday of Sylvester Graham, America's first hard-core health-food promoter, and March 7, the birthday of Anthony Comstock, who led an early crusade to purify American thought. The farther their followers stay from Colorado, the better off we will be.
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