Adage (ad’-age): One of several terms describing short, pithy sayings, or traditional expressions of conventional wisdom.
Slogans and sayings are pretty much the same. But sayings want to teach you something and slogans want to sell you something. Sometimes they can do both. For example, “A penny saved is a penny earned” can be heard as a lesson in thrift. It can also be used as a slogan by a bank to get you to deposit money in an account in the bank. Given his ethos, Ben Franklin probably intended it to to be used as an adage and a slogan.
I was pushing 65 and I had a waddle swinging under my chin. I looked like I had had a turkey body part gafted under my throat. I tried stuffing it in my shirt and buttoning the top button to conceal it and hold it in. I’d be in the middle of a conversation and it would pop out and swing back and forth. It scared a lot of people, and one or two yelled “That’s disgusting!” and flipped over my desk, and ran out my office door. One person even pulled a gun!
But that’s not all. My grandchildren would go “Gobble, Gobble Grandpa.” The littlest one would pull on my waddle and go “Choo, choo, wa, wa!” like my waddle was the pull-chord on a train whistle. Everybody thought it was cute but me. The worst was when I was cooking on the grill and bent over to check the flame and my waddle swung into the fire. Luckily I had a bucket of basting sauce nearby and stuck my waddle in it to cool it and sooth the pain. My cruel cousin Eddie took a picture and I appeared with a basted waddle on the front page of “Cry Truth,” our local bullshit newspaper. The headline was “Local Mad-Man Bastes Own Waddle.” I was angered and humiliated and vowed to do something about my errant waddle.
A co-worker whose breasts had grown remarkably big in one month, told me about her plastic surgeon Dr. Skinner. His slogan was “A stitch in time saves nine.” I could never figure out what that saying meant, but in the context of plastic surgery, maybe it meant that stitching your time-sags could take nine years off your age. Anyway, I made an appointment for “waddle reduction surgery.” I got up early and was making a smoothie when my waddle missed swinging into the blender by a quarter of an inch. Boy, I couldn’t wait to get the damn thing fixed.
I met Dr. Skinner in the waiting room and he said, “I hear you’re a real swinger.” At first I didn’t get it, but then I realized he was referring to my swinging waddle. I almost hit him.
They laid me out on the operating table and the anesthetic knocked me out. When I awoke I saw two voluptuous bumps pushing up under my gown. I felt my neck and my waddle was still there. Skinner had mixed me up with another patient. He came into my room and asked me how I liked my new boobies. I was enraged. He told me not to worry, the “boobies” were actually coconut shells. He told me that at the last minute he had to scrub the waddle surgery. The coconut shells were supposed to make me laugh. He told me that he had realized at the last minute he had run out of scalpel blades and was unable to slice off my waddle.
We went ahead with the surgery the next day. My waddle was successfully removed. Life is good for me, but not so much for Dr. Skinner. I’m suing him for $1,000,000 for his coconut trick.
Definitions courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu).
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