T. Buckingham Thomas

In our nation's first century, ballot counting and interstate travel required considerable time. Therefore four months were allowed between Election Day and the date when the winners were sworn in.

But once technology had improved, the 20th Amendment to the Constitution (ratified in 1933) eliminated six weeks of unnecessary lame-duck waiting. The Inauguration of the President was rescheduled from the relatively-mild March 4 to the always-frigid January 20.

I always thought that was a bad idea. Late January is the coldest part of the year in this region. For example, look at tomorrow's prediction.

Thirty-two years ago today, on January 19, 1994, temperatures in Pittsburgh began with a low of -22 and climbed only to -3 that afternoon. Fortunately, over in Washington, D.C., there was no outdoor ceremony scheduled for the steps of the Capitol the next day.

“Now, it's bigger than I told you. After realizing we're going to do the Inauguration in that building, it's got all bulletproof glass. It's got all drone, they call it drone-free roof. Drones won't touch it. It's a big ... it's a big, beautiful, safe building.”

But there was a ceremony planned for January 20 in 1985. when the noon temperature would be 7° above. On that occasion (left) and again in 2025, the swearing-in had to be moved indoors.

President Donald Trump promises that the weather won't be a problem in the future. Why not? Three weeks ago at a press conference, after claiming that Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell's renovation of the central bank's headquarters would cost “up to $4.1 billion,” he compared that to his own pet project. “I'm doing a magnificent, big, beautiful ballroom that the country has wanted — the White House has wanted for 150 years. It's a massive job, and it's a tiny fraction of that number. And we're under budget and ahead of schedule.”

Nevertheless, it won't accommodate “a million and a half people,” which is what Mr. Trump thought the shivering audience on the Mall looked like at his first Inauguration in 2017. The high that day was 48°.

Last night the American Heroes Channel ran a documentary on the 1968 hunt for Martin Luther King’s assassin. They called it Justice for MLK.

Perhaps they should have called it Revenge for MLK. James Earl Ray’s pursuers were not seeking justice as much as retribution.

For Rev. King, “justice” was not the electric chair. It was equal rights, and “we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.” Justice was not about punishing bad people. It was about guaranteeing good people the opportunities they deserve.

I never met Rev. King, although as I related in this letter, I met his father at a photo op in Marion, Ohio, in 1970.

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. did visit my college several times, but that was before I arrived as a freshman in the fall of 1965. Dr. King’s final speech on campus had been delivered that spring.

For easier reading, I’ve condensed the text of that commencement address, “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution.” In observance of MLK Day, I’ve posted it here under the title To Dream, But Not to Sleep.

JANUARY 16, 2026
THE MISPLACED STRAP

Some 150 years ago, shortly after Canada became its own dominion separate from Great Britain, its North West Mounted Police began wearing an element of the British Army uniform: red coats.

A quarter of a century later, they replaced their helmets with broad-brimmed “campaign hats” like those worn by Canadian cavalry during the Second Boer War.

These hats often included a strap to keep them on the Mountie's head. The strap was attached to the inner edge of the brim, midway between the front and back. Thus the strap could be run either across the front of the skull or across the back.

Nowadays in the US, the uniforms of many state troopers and highway patrol officers include similar hats. The headgear is worn with a forward tilt to express no-nonsense seriousness.

However, various parts of the country have front-vs-back disagreement

Some states keep the strap at the back of the head, where I think it belongs.

Others try to emulate the front-mounted chin straps on football helmets.

But there's a problem: even with the campaign hat tilted forward, its strap is typically too short to fit underneath the chin (red line).

The alternative is to slide it into the little gap between the chin and the lower lip (green line).

To me and many others, these lip straps appear ridiculous, as in this frame from a January 13 newscast. They look like they'd get into the trooper's mouth and affect his ability to speak and give orders.

The straps seem to be threatening to slide up even higher and become nose straps, like the luggage that ensnared Jim Carrey in the movie Liar Liar.

Pennsylvania and other states need to correct their uniform regulations!

One or two thousand additional federal agents are being deployed to Minneapolis as part of the Trump administration's latest effort to crack down on immigration. JD Vance says he thinks the deportation numbers will go up once they get more agents hired and going door to door.

Retired Ambassador Ken Fairfax: A reminder from Huffington Post that DHS and ICE have opened fire on unarmed civilians 16 times since Trump took office, killing 4 people. In every case, DHS claims that the victims “assaulted officers” and/or tried to ram them with cars. In every case, evidence proves they are lying. Every time.

Charlotte Clymer: He didn't shoot her in the head at point blank range because he felt like he was in danger. He shot her in the head at point blank range because he was furious that she wasn't afraid of him. He felt emasculated.

David French: The shooting in Minnesota is exceptional only because Good died, not because the administration lied. In fact, for the Trump administration, lying is the norm. Trump isn't a responsible leader, and he's at his absolute worst in a crisis. He lies. He inflames his base. To the worst parts of MAGA, your worth is defined by your obedience. And those who don't obey? Well, they deserve to die, and no one should mourn their death.

Michael Squires: If law enforcement needs a mask to conduct their daily duties, that should tell you all you need to know.

David French: And — most dangerous of all — the administration pits the federal government against states and cities, treating them not as partners in constitutional governance but as hostile inferiors that must be brought to heel.

Scott Centoni: They don't have to cancel elections. They plan to send ICE to swarm election sites in cities in swing states. Shoot a few nearby immigrants here, arrest a few citizens there, it doesn't take a lot of boots on the ground to depress turnout by 20%.

Under the new four-team college football playoff format, the second annual national championship game last night (Alabama 45, Clemson 40) drew noticeably less interest than last year's much-ballyhooed first game. At least around here it did. Pittsburghers care about only Steelers football. Clemson plays in the same conference as the University of Pittsburgh, but that means nothing. Yesterday’s advance story about the upcoming college championship was buried on Page C-5 of the sports section.

I got an offer in the mail yesterday to re-subscribe to Reader’s Digest. Apparently, the little monthly still exists.

Way back in 1958, when I was 11 years old, my family took a summer vacation trip that led ultimately to a rustic inn on Rangeley Lake in Maine. I felt rather like the compulsive reader “Brick” from The Middle, because there wasn’t room to take any of my books. There might be no television, and local newspapers would be rather sketchy. I might be reduced to reading cereal boxes.

Therefore I slipped into my suitcase the latest edition of Reader’s Digest. Like this copy, it contained one condensed book and 30 articles “of lasting interest” gleaned from various magazines. I rationed myself to read exactly three articles each evening.

JANUARY 10, 2026
PRINGLE HILL

The theoretical blue hill is saddle-shaped. If you drive across it from west to east, the red dot seems to be the low point. But if you're driving from south to north, the red dot seems to be the high point.

In my new apartment at noon on Saturday, April 14, 1974, I realized that such hyperbolic paraboloids are shaped like Pringles, the stackable “potato chip” from Procter & Gamble which may have been named for a suburban street north of the company's Cincinnati headquarters.

I had to share my discovery with my old college friend. The letter I wrote is part of this month's 100 Moons article.

Commercials often feature actors portraying real people speaking directly to us. “My rash was really bothering me. So finally I went to the doctor.”

However, I’ve seen a pharmaceutical ad that begins, “My Moderate-to-Severe Chronic Plaque Psoriasis made a simple trip to the grocery store anything but simple. So finally I had an important conversation with my dermatologist.”

Do you ever speak with such clinical specificity? I think I’d like to have an important conversation with Humira’s ad writer.

That’s because I myself suffer from Moderate-to-Severe Chronic Advertising Copy Incredulity.

For example, on a rack of tanks outside a store, I saw this slogan: “It’s not just propane.” So of course I had to wonder. “It’s not just propane? What else do they put in that tank? Rocket fuel?”

Mr. Hank Hill overheard my foolishness. "That boy ain't right, I tell you what,” he grumbled to himself.

Then he told me, “Check out this here literature. Blue Rhino is ’specially careful with their propane tanks and propane accessories. That’s your ‘what else!’

“Every tank is cleaned, or even repainted. Then it’s labeled with all your safety information and instructions. They test it for leaks, fill it up with just the right amount of propane, and deliver it to the store.

“Of course, they don’t deliver to Mega Lo Mart no more. Not after the big blowup over there.”

2026 UPDATE: On TV commercials and print offers, we often see fine print at the bottom to keep the lawyers happy. And radio commercials sometimes end with gibberish: a voice speeded up so much to fit the time allotted that one can't understand it.

Lately I've heard an alternative in which the announcer notes that "teas and seas" are available online. There's no explanation of teas and seas. I suspect they're initials for Terms and Conditions, but who can tell?

JANUARY 7, 2026
STILL AMERICA'S SNOWIEST CITY

Introducing Bob Costas recently, Peter Sagal referred to Bob's alma mater as “the Harvard of broadcasting skills.” Naturally, that would be the Newhouse School at Syracuse University. I also attended that “Harvard.”

Some of my Master's degree classmates from Newhouse have been reuniting occasionally via Zoom. Last fall the current Dean, Mark Lodato, was our guest.

He informed us that Syracuse, New York, still does get cold in the winter, but there's a lot less snow than we had to slog through in 1970.

Was he right? Of course some years bring more snow than others, but Syracuse is in the lake-effect belt downstream from the Great Lakes. Below are recent annual snowfall totals.

The chart implies that the climate has indeed been changing, especially since 2018.

Nevertheless, Almanac.com says that the city still averages 114.3 inches of snow per year. And last year they had 121.6 inches — more than ten feet, making Syracuse once again the snowiest major city in the United States. They've been the snowiest spot in New York State for 39 of the last 73 years. (Buffalo is second with only seven wins.)

And what about this winter? More than two feet fell at Syracuse Hancock International Airport on December 30, the second-snowiest day in the city's recorded history! As of January 2, 2026, the city had already recorded 79.2 inches of snow, over double its normal total for that date. More is to come.

As a one-time physics major, I learned (I hope I've got this right) that quantum mechanics describes very tiny particles as “wave functions” of probabilities. The particle may have a 33% chance of being over here but also a 33% chance of being over there, so we might say it's “in” both places at the same time. Theoretical physicist Erwin Schrödinger admitted that this concept seems absurd if we try to apply it to large objects, such as a cat in a sealed box. According to quantum rules, the cat is in a “superposition” of being both alive and dead simultaneously! That is, until we open the box and the act of observation forces it into one state.

As a part-time puzzle solver, I'm amazed at the ability of crossword creators to find words with particular qualities to fit their bizarre themes. Of course, there are some 600,000 words in the Oxford English Dictionary, so they do have choices to sort through.

A standard 15-character-wide New York Times Monday puzzle referenced a rare basketball achievement with the entry QUADRUPLEDOUBLE and then somehow came up with three 15-character examples: aCCeSShoLLywOOd, miSSmiSSiSSiPPi, and weLLwhOOpdEEdOO.

One constructor, Sam Ezersky, said that to build a Sunday puzzle “it took months to cobble together" this set of ten before-and-after pairs: pensive ex, managed micro, complete auto, heated super, penultimate ante, African pan, solving dis, apocalyptic post, standard sub, and vision pro.

The Times crossword for Thursday, October 9, 2024, caught my eye in particular. It was the third by constructor Grant Boroughs to appear there, and his first Schrödinger puzzle (named after the superposed cat). In the Times crossword column “Wordplay,” Deb Amlen explains that in a Schrödinger puzzle, “certain squares accept more than one letter, and using either letter is considered correct. That means a Schrödinger puzzle accepts both versions of a changeable entry, even though there is only a single clue.”

Boroughs had to find a dozen entry pairs with the following properties: The two words or phrases can each be referenced, maybe obliquely, by the same clue. (That rules out pairs that have little in common, like WORM and DORM.) The two words or phrases are identical except for one letter which I'll call the “cat.” I'll depict it with the symbol Ø to mean, in this case, “either W or D.” And in each pair, the “cat” is either the first or last letter.

Here are the dozen pairs he came up with. In his grid he chose two of the pairs to cross at the “cat.” For example,

COØ
FLEØ
PAØ
PLOØ
SOØ
ØASHBOARD
ØAYAHEAD
ØELLS
ØINED
ØISHES
ØITHER
ØRYHUMOR

Major food source animal
Raced, as away from danger
Dog leg terminus
Move forward resolutely
Do some garden work
Instrument panel
What lies before you, with “the”
Areas that are lower than their surrounding terrain
Lavishly regaled, in a way
Things listed on a wedding registry
Fail to act decisively in the face of a challenge
Trademark of deadpan standups

The resulting creation, says Ms. Amlen, might just put Mr. Boroughs on the map of constructors to keep an eye on.

Some fundraisers like to set an arbitrary goal and an arbitrary target date, then challenge donors to reach that goal before the deadline. I received several such requests last month, many noting the practicality of hurrying up and making a charitable contribution while the 2025 tax deduction still was available.

Others may have received the late-December pitch below, headlined “Uh oh... Troubles are BOILING OVER.” The post mentioned three Presidential deadlines.

It threatened workers with losing their promised $2,000 to illegal aliens if they didn't respond in the next hour. It warned of a “very likely” loss of Congress if another goal wasn't reached by midnight tomorrow. And it predicted a Communist takeover of the Democrat[ic] Party if yet another goal wasn't met in less than 48 hours.

Only the second Trouble is at all likely. But after these deadlines pass, MAGA won't bother you again — until 2026.

Fundraisers never mention that it doesn't really matter whether or not their artificial goal is met. They'll gladly accept your promise of a “$58 monthly seed" or other cash even if you don't get it to them until after the target date.

They're merely trying to frighten you into immediate action before you have time to think about it.

1959-2021

JANUARY 1, 2016 ANGST

Canadian comedian Norm Macdonald, currently appearing as KFC’s Colonel Sanders, sometimes posts lengthy items on Twitter by breaking them up into individual sentences. This week he used more than a dozen tweets to transmit a piece he appears to have written 42 years before.

On December 20, 1973, Norm was growing up in Ottawa. TV news reported the tragic deaths that day of Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco (terrorist bomb in Spain) and singer Bobby Darin (open-heart surgery). Also, 10-year-old Norm couldn’t stop thinking about two men who perished earlier in an attack on an airplane.

He was sure his own death was coming soon, somehow. On December 30, here’s what he must have written. I’ve edited the schoolboy spelling and punctuation.

This felt familiar. I too went through a period of pre-adolescent angst. Fortunately, in my case, what frightened me was merely the global situation, not a drunk uncle. In my case, my father didn’t tell me to stop watching the news, but my mother did tell me we shouldn’t worry about things over which we have no control. I recalled the experience in this post-9/11 article.

Angst is “a feeling of deep anxiety or dread, typically an unfocused one about the human condition or the state of the world in general.” We fear horrible things are about to happen. What things they may be, we cannot tell.

But demagogues and other politicians are quite willing to gain our support by scaring us even more, making us even more afraid. The government is coming to take our guns! The Mexicans are coming to rape our women and take our jobs! The environmentalists will take our SUVs! The Muslims will behead us!

Such overblown trepidations are no longer merely ludicrous, writes Scott Renshaw from Utah. “I can't laugh at scary, delusional, desperately-frightened-of-change people any more. There are too many of them, causing too much damage.”

“Who wouldn’t be depressed about the world today?” asks another Canadian, Margaret Wente, in a Christmas Day article in The Globe and Mail. “Everywhere you look, it’s doom and gloom. So, turn off the news and consider this. For most of humanity, life is improving at an accelerated rate!

“Most people find this hard to believe. After all, we’re programmed to look for trouble. Here are some reasons to start the new year on an optimistic note:

“This year, for the first time on record, the percentage of the world’s population living in extreme poverty has sunk below 10 per cent, the World Bank says. This is a stunning achievement. As recently as 1990, 37 per cent of the world’s population was desperately poor. ...Malnutrition has all but disappeared, except in countries with terrible governments. Eighty per cent of the world’s population use contraceptives and have two-child families. Eighty per cent vaccinate their children. Eighty per cent have electricity in their homes. Ninety per cent of the world’s girls go to school.”

What about violence? “We’ve never lived in such peaceful times,” says Wente. “Wars and conflict fill the news, but they are at historic lows. ...As for terrorist attacks, you’re far more likely to be killed by a collision with a deer. ...Between 1993 and 2013, according to a Pew Research Center analysis, the rate of U.S. gun homicides fell by half, from seven homicides for every 100,000 people to 3.8 homicides in 2013.”

What about illness? “We are gradually wiping out the worst of the world’s diseases. In 1988, polio was endemic in 125 countries. Now, there are just two: Afghanistan and Pakistan.”

“Make a New Year’s resolution,” Wente advises, “to count your many blessings — including flush toilets, electric lights, polio vaccines, and peace.”

As the apostle Paul advises in the fourth chapter of Philippians, ⁶ Do not be anxious about anything.

His recommendation goes something like this: ^8b If there is anything excellent, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about those things instead. ⁷ And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds.

According to this “In Retrospect” clipping from the Richwood Gazette in my former Ohio hometown, it was a century ago that J.J. Wallace brought an old postcard to the Gazette office. He wanted to show the editor “the great difference in prices a quarter of a century ago compared to those of today,” meaning 1925.

The card had been mailed in 1899 by a local dry goods merchant, Hile Eckelberry, who was advertising his spring prices. His store might have looked something like the photo below. Back then, many households purchased materials — including crepon, a heavy crepe fabric with lengthwise crinkles — to stitch together their own clothes. (Alternatively, they could have visited merchant and tailor Owen Livingston, advertising “the highest class tailoring at the lowest price possible” at his shop under the K. of P. Hall.)

In 1925, J.J. Wallace must have considered the postcard's prices remarkably low, but “you ain't seen nothing yet.” From online research, here are typical prices of these textiles in 1899 and in 2025. Your results may vary.

Calico, per yard
3 cents > $3

Good heavy overalls, per pair
35 cents > $50

36-inch black crepon, per yard
50 cents > $11

Good heavy sheeting muslin, per 25 yards
1 dollar > $125

Today I'm remembering Jan Olson, my friend from college who passed away ten years ago on this date.

We were physics majors in the 1960s. That was before cell phones. To text each other surreptitiously in class, we had to use scraps of paper.

(stock illustration)

Some of those conversations are preserved in this month's 100 Moons article.

DECEMBER 24, 2025 FILLING IN SOME DETAILS

I was born long ago at a hospital in Zanesville, Ohio. It says so on my birth certificate. But I've lived in Pennsylvania for nearly 52 years. So when the politicians decide to take a census, am I required to drive 150 miles back to Zanesville to be counted? Don't be ridiculous.

However, Luke's gospel tells us that Joseph and his wife Mary did have to undertake such a journey. And she was pregnant at the time. And they didn't have a car.

Actually, I suspect the gospel writers may have made up this unlikely story because Biblical prophecy had to be fulfilled. “Jesus of Nazareth,” well-known to be a Galilean, had to be born not right there in Nazareth (as one would assume) but far to the south in Bethlehem.

We're familiar with the Bible's version of these Christmas stories in Matthew and Luke. But this week, Brother Billy gets an alternative eyewitness explanation from Heli Davidson — Joseph's dad.

Dear Mr. Campbell: I'm enjoying your 15.4-ounce microwavable tomato soup bowls. As a single guy in my seventies, I find this product easier to prepare than your larger-quantity condensed soups. There's no need to use a separate bowl nor to add water nor to refrigerate the leftover extra servings.

However, I do need to unpack my tool kit. Readers of this website may recognize where I'm going with this.

First I use my Magnifying Glass to decipher the microscopic white-on-red instructions on the side of the bowl. (I've included the tip of a ballpoint pen in the photo to show scale.) (After I've opened the bowl, I'll be unable to tilt it to read it, for fear of spilling the contents which you've generously filled all the way to the brim. A full 16 ounces would not have fit.) As nearly as I can tell, I think the instructions say the microwaving time is 1½ minutes — actually “HIGH1 1/2 min.” — but I'll ignore that and use 2½ minutes because I prefer hotter soup.

Next, since my arthritic hands can't pry off the plastic cover, I take advantage of one of the steam holes that you've thoughtfully provided. Poking my Screwdriver through one of the holes, I use it to lever the cover up and off.

The soup is still sealed beneath a plastic film. Being unable to grasp the film firmly with my fingers, I use my Pliers to grab the little tab so I can peel it off.

Now all I have to do is replace the cover loosely, microwave the bowl, lift off the cover, and enjoy. Simple!

Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich likes to compare the average compensations of Chief Executive Officers to that of ordinary workers.

There's no comparison.

He reports that the ratio was a reasonable 20:1 when I graduated from high school but 280:1 today. “Trickle-down economics was always a sham,” he writes. “Nothing has ever trickled down.”

Television manufacturers, having failed to convince enough of us to invest in three-dimensional TVs, have essentially given up on that idea. They’ve moved on from 3D to 4K.

“Ultra HD,” or 4K, boasts over eight million pixels. That's four times as many as HD. To accommodate so many tiny dots, the screen has to be bigger — too large for my little one-person apartment. Besides, as far as I'm concerned, ordinary HD usually offers enough detail.

One exception: classic CinemaScope movies designed to fill huge theaters in a 16:6 aspect ratio, such as 1955’s Oklahoma!

When CinemaScope is letterboxed to fit a 16:9 TV screen, group scenes become too small to clearly show facial expressions.

I move closer to the screen, but I wish I had more pixels.

I also get along fine without 3D, both for TV and for movies. Production techniques can be employed to depict the third dimension without requiring special glasses.

In this clip, notice how lighting, focus, and smooth camera movement clearly separate the King’s Singers from the choir in the background and from the flowers in the foreground. It’s a beautiful feeling of depth.

(Also beautiful: the final verse. Are you listening, white Christians who so furiously rage against any and all Samaritans? “Truly He taught us to love one another. His law is love. And His gospel is peace.”)

¶ A meaningless observation from watching news channels:

Panelists are always asked their opinions about something. “Do you think Donald Trump will run for a third term?”

Some participants will respond directly: “Of course he will.”

But most will stall for a second while mentally composing their answer. “Well, look.... ” Or if they need more time, “Well, look, uh, you know, I mean.... ”

When the President noted that a kid in a financially strapped family doesn't need to receive “37 dolls” this Christmas, the closed captioning on both CNN and MS NOW helpfully autocompleted the gift by adding the missing “ar” and reformatting the result as “$37.”

The same application insists on referring to Susie Wiles, the White House Chief of Staff, as “Siouxsie Wiles.” That spelling seems ridiculous.

But I checked, and apparently they've simply linked to the wrong name in their database. There actually is a Siouxsie Wiles, a British-born microbiologist specializing in infectious diseases.

However, she's unlikely to be a fan of RFK Jr.'s CDC. Having spoken out against anti-vaxxers, she was named Skeptic of the Year by the New Zealand Skeptics in 2016.

An episode earlier this year of ABC’s sitcom Last Man Standing began with a couple trying to sleep. The neighbor’s dog was barking again. The first 17 seconds of dialogue included three very dated jokes.

“Somebody’s got to muzzle that dog, or rescue Timmy from the well.” (The character Timmy first appeared on the TV series Lassie in 1957. He was played by Jon Provost, here on Cloris Leachman’s lap. Lassie was the collie that barked for help.)

“It’s Larabee’s German shepherd. Every morning this week! Damn dog’s giving Germans a bad name.” (Germany was our enemy in 1917-18 and 1941-45.)

“I’m surprised the Shirazis’ French poodle hasn’t surrendered.” (France surrendered to the invading Germans in 1940.)

Are comedy writers so lazy (or elderly) that they can’t come up with more recent references? Perhaps to events that took place during the target audience’s lifetime?

Of course, I shouldn't be complaining. They might fall back on even older allusions, such as “Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?”

There used to be a Gothic adverb ufta meaning “repeatedly.” In German and Old English it became oft. Then in the 13th century, the English extended oft to often.

By the 15th century, the pronunciation was often degraded to “offen.” The t had become silent! (Except for performers using a British accent.) And by the 16th century, the original root word oft had become archaic.

The Hartford Courant notes that the t was once actually pronounced in phrases such as “Cristes Maesse” (Christ's Mass), better known now as “Christmas.” But during the 17th century, the t sound was dropped whenever it was preceded by a fricative consonant (such as s or f) and followed by a voiced consonant (such as l, r, m or n). Got that? Anyway, before you could say “misseltoe,” Irving Berlin was writing about a “white Chrissmus” where tree tops “glissen” and children “lissen.”

There are, of course, many silent letters in our orthography. To English speakers, recently acquired Pittsburgh Pirates outfielder Jhostynxon Garcia has a first name that looks as complicated as the random characters in a password. Therefore, “The Password” has become his nickname. However, the h is silent and the x is pronounced like an s, so he's really “Joe-Stinson Garcia.” By the way, today is his 23rd birthday.

There's a major Canadian city that offen loses its second t and becomes “Toronno.”

Other examples skip over an entire syllable. A steak sauce, named after a West Midlands county in England called WoRCEstershire, elides the RCE and is pronounced “Woostershir.” And the midweek day named WeDnEsdAy kicks out the DEA to become “Wensdy.”

Is the opposite true? Do we actually insert and pronounce letters that are absent from the spelling? Or scramble their order?

• Many people mischievously add a second i to turn an adjective into “MISCHIEVIOUS,” as though it were “mysterious.” And folks outside North America add a second i to turn an element into “ALUMINIUM.”

• Over poor connections, it can be hard to differentiate the spoken digits 5 and 9. Some folks append an r to the former to make it “fiver.” Alternatively, when my mother was a telephone operator she was instructed to insert an uh into the latter and pronounce it “ny-uhn.”

• Podcaster John Frederick playfully calls the people of the former Soviet Union “Solviets.” Nor does he “regert” referring to that thing on the right as a “bakset” and to its country of origin as “Englang.”

• And, thanks to the Incans (or Spanish pronunciation), there's an unwritten w in “quinoa.”

“Wake up, America! Some people actually disagree with me! They have attitudes they're trying to shove down our throats!”

That’s the frantic warning in many embittered letters to the editor and postings on social media. For example, someone called dankies213 wrote: “People are always complaining that they don't like religion shoved down their throat, when Hollywood shoves beauty and ‘looking good’ down our throats and no one complains about that really.”

And someone named David Nedlin posted last week: “Maybe now some people will wake up & listen to me when I say we have to deport & eliminate ALL Muslims & Gather up ALL illegal firearms & execute their owners. Think that’s too extreme? Maybe someday a loved one of yours will be SHOT DEAD & then you may change your mind. Wake up, people — or you will be next!”

I’m tired of opinionated people who tell me I need to realize — dare we say I need to be woke up — that I'm somehow being duped into swallowing things that think are obviously evil. At a minimum, we need new metaphors.

DECEMBER 6, 2025 TOOL BEHAVIOR

Can animals use tools? Why not?

One example is a crow that finds a stick, pokes it into a termite nest, pulls it out crawling with bugs, and eats them.

I saw a video purporting to be another example, but I'm not so sure.

A female wolf probably had observed a human retrieving a crab trap from deep water. She realized, “I can do that! And there's food in that thing!” She swam out and pulled the buoy to shore, then grabbed the attached rope and reeled that in as well. The crab bait was soon on land for her dining convenience.

But that wasn't tool use, strictly speaking. The wolf hadn't invented a new purpose for the buoy and rope, bringing them in from elsewhere and making serve as her “tools.” When a chimp unwraps a banana, is it converting the peel into a “tool” to access the sweet fruit inside? She had merely taken advantage of an existing situation and used it for her own benefit.

When I was in grade school, kids had no trouble reading Sally's letter to the North Pole in this classic Peanuts cartoon, with each letter smoothly connected to the next.

When I reached college, I was still writing in cursive, though I would gradually abandon it over the next few years.

Nowadays I'm told that kids can no longer read this type of handwriting. What is this world coming to? Is it the fault of present-day brute-force writing instruments?

Public-school teacher Josh Giesbrecht writes, “My own writing morphed from Palmerian script into mostly print shortly after starting college, when I regularly had to copy down reams of notes. But fountain pens want to connect letters. Ballpoint pens and No.2 pencils need to be convinced to write, need to be pushed into the paper rather than merely brush against it.”

When I was a high school student in semi-rural Ohio more than 60 years ago, the plan was this: If the weather was going to be bad on Tuesday, school was canceled.

Here in western Pennsylvania today, we're expecting several of inches of snow. It will be hazardous for the buses to run their routes. But education must go on! Practically every district has announced that they'll hold classes as usual, but on a two-hour delay.

That got me thinking. Under these conditions, are the first and second periods simply eliminated, starting the day with the third period instead? That would make things difficult for students and teachers who have second-period algebra, since that class would fail to meet at all for a percentage of winter days.

Or does the entire schedule play out as usual, only two hours later? That would delay lunch until late afternoon, and the students wouldn't be dismissed until sunset.

So I went online to learn how delays are actually handled at Highlands High School down the street.

It turns out that they move the first two periods to the end of the day so the half-hour lunch remains at approximately noon. Then they shorten all the periods by 40%, from 42 minutes to 25.

Study faster, everybody!

BAA, aside from ovine utterances, can stand for a Business Associate Agreement or possibly the Boston Athletic Association or maybe a Bachelor of Applied Arts degree. What do we call abbreviations like this?

As memory slowly fades with advancing age, I find myself sometimes unable to recall a bit of common knowledge. A string of initials pronounced as though they form an actual word is called ... not an anagram, but what? I asked Google last week and was reminded that the term is acronym, from roots denoting a name “nym” whittled down to a point “acro.”

Further searching revealed that many acronyms were invented by telegraphers in order to use fewer characters. One example was “SCOTUS” for Supreme Court Of The United States, which the United Press teletype at my college radio station often printed as a header for news stories.

Yet further research revealed that in 1974, NASA scientist Jack Cover invented a stun gun to shock and disable airplane hijackers. Remembering a 1911 novel about a weapon for elephant hunting, Dr. Cover named his device the “Tom Swift Electric Rifle” or TSER. Tom's name was soon modified to Tom A. Swift. The resulting acronym happily rhymes with the names of “laser” and “phaser,” which could be considered similar devices.

And who was this fictional Tom Swift? A tinkerer like Tom Edison who developed inventions by trial and error. His ideas were depicted in more than a hundred young adult novels during the 20th century: flying submarines, airplane-engine silencers, synthetic diamonds, house trailers, portable movie cameras.

In dialogue, the books often appended an apt adverb to the simple verb “said.” That gave rise to “Tom Swifty” parodies that were popular in the 1960s. For example, the title of this piece. Or “‘I forgot what I needed at the store,’ Tom said listlessly.” Or “‘We're out of flowers,’ Tom said lackadaisically.”