Y'all come back now

There is an illegitimate, plural possessive form of "you" that exposes a strange hole in American English. It comes up even when one is dealing with well-educated and usually articulate speakers. Like many Americans, I learned English by ear, and boast a near-total ignorance of formal rules of grammar, but I know a bogus term when I hear one... and that term is "your guyses." Example: "I am not sure when your guyses' contract expires."

Let's think about why this term exists. I am in a meeting at this very moment in which the term was just used. It was addressed to a small group of people with collective ownership of a thingamajig. Why would'nt "your" have sufficed? In fact, possessive aside, why do we *ever* choose "you guys" over "you?"

It would seem to me that we speakers of English have a need for something more concrete... a specific second-person pronoun that is plural. According to your Strunks and Whites, "you" in fact fills both the singular and plural. And yet, this still seems to cause a certain itchiness, a certain uneasiness, with most. We speakers of English crave second person plural specificity, further evidenced by a similar term invented by Southerners to fill this same purpose: "y'all."

"You guys" and "y'all" slip easily if incorrectly enough into our vernacular until this matter of the possessive comes along. That's when things fall apart, at least, to the discerning ears of tiny dog. And yet, I have no solution for those who crave possessive plural pronoun specificity short of inventing a new word, as the Southerners have done.

Surely we do not want to start a precedent of legitimizing Southern turns of phrase, however, so that leaves us nowhere. If your guyses' thoughts lend any new perspective on this issue, please enlighten the readers of tiny dog.

I wish I knew how to knit you

Update: Although this is not a knitting blog, I repeat, not a knitting blog, I am here to bring the whole matter of the iPod socks full circle by announcing that I have more or less created a rib-stitch iPod sock, and thus I am ready to begin to fulfill iPod sock requests, sans of course, iPod products.

On to the older portion of the post...

What I wanted to do here with this post is address all the haterz who said I would never accomplish anything close to an iPod sock in my knitting endeavors. Granted this project looks more like it would be an apt accessory to a 5-year-old's tea party, but it is sort of iPod shaped-- I even tested it.

However, I've been informed by the h8rs that unless I master the rib stitch, you know, those little vertical rows you see on your socks, I have no right to refer to this creation as a sock. Point taken. Well, if you can't fix it, you gotta stand it. So here it is. An iPurse.

Fetish Pizza

Recently, two consumer fast food product items have reached such heights of corporate desperation and cynicism, that I can no longer remain silent.

They are, respectively, Taco Bell's Crunchwrap Supreme, and Pizza Hut's Cheesy Bites pizza.

Let's start with the Crunchwrap, "America's second-favorite one handed pastime." My brother said it best: "Dear god, it's a melange of the entire Taco Bell menu, fried up into a hell frisbee." Sib, you have likely hit on the exact corporate Crunchwrap blueprint; expect a humorless call from TB HQ. The Crunchwrap, by my estimation, is likely made as follows: one scoop of prep table leavings, straight from the Hefty bags. Place in center of tortilla and mash in edges. Plunge into deep fryer. Sell to fools.

Only the talking sauce packet campaign rates lower in my overall ranking of pathetic moves by TB HQ.

On to Pizza Hut.

First, I must disclose that, long ago, I myself was once possibly employed for three years by the 'Hut as a telephone operator, deep in the windowless bowels of a Central California office park**. In this capacity, I was impelled to hawk "Land Before Time" hand puppets, which were rubbery, condom-scented dinosaurs with giant holes in their posteriors, intended for a human hand. "Suggestive selling," it was called, and if you were caught not doing it by a corporate phone spy, it was curtains for you. Thus I am personally acquainted with Pizza Hut's marketing world view, and should in no way be shaken by the absurdity of a product such as the following.

And yet: just when I thought my exasperation with Pizza Hut's unholy crust mutations had run itself aground, here comes the addition of the "Cheesy Bite," essentially a tacked-on Pupperoni dog snack of dough and cheese.

To be fair, it is no secret that Pizza Hut has been tampering with the basic pizza blueprint for years, say, injecting crusts with syringes of Velveeta, or entombing entire pizzas in the bellies of yet larger, meta pizzas. We can only speculate that The Cheesy Bite is based on Pizza Hut's ironclad consumer research, indicating that America's appetite for surgically altered fetish pizza rises unabated.

**This story, being that it qualifies as a snippet of my unpublished memoirs, may or may not be entirely based in fact, but rather hail from the mists of emotional truth.

Cobweb

A certain someone, a.k.a. "anonymous," has accused me of hosting a cobweb. It's true that, thus far, 2006 has not seemed blogworthy to the likes of tiny dog. Lots of short, dark days and meetings has been about the long and short of it.

At times I get these vague ideas for subject matter, for example, a dissertation on Milton Bradley's "Ice Cube." Known simply as "The Ice Game" by my brother and myself, this 1970's board game classic involved freezing your playing pieces, which were shaped like little Kilroys, and then attempting to destroy them with salt mines, metal washers, and hot water baths. Did the Ice Cube playing field turn into a backwash of carpet-staining, briny mush? Yes, which is why mom tended to banish the whole affair outside to the driveway. However, where I grew up, the 100-degree summers made for a mighty brief Ice Cube game time. But none of this touches on the strange familial obsession with memories of the Ice Game in later years, which would have been the subject of my rant, had I written it.

Update: A certain "anonymous" has piped back up, informing me personally that he rated this udpate as "weak." "It kind of fizzed out, don't you think?" he opined, via IM. When I then informed him that I was currently updating the Elliott Smith page, he said "you might as well turn this into a mom blog," which is my term for a blog that is generally navel-gazing and boorish.

What is a fitting punishment for such a person as "Anonymous"? I shall mull this over today.