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Honolulu Lite Charles Memminger |
Time to serve up
some fresh mea culpasAnyone suffering from retention deficit disorder (as I do) who happens to write 200 columns a year (as I do) is going to screw up occasionally and tick off a considerable number of people (boy, do I!).
Retention deficit disorder is the latest affliction I have contracted. Actually, I invented it. It's a condition you get as you get older, and the symptoms include finding yourself forgetting stuff like your dog's name and what you call that big thing in the kitchen with all the cold food inside it.
If you can't remember things that you see every day, what chance do you have remembering verb tenses, allegedly submitted to memory I forget how many years ago?
So I want to thank the readers who pointed out that I was wrong in a recent column when I said I was using the "third person plural" to describe myself as "we." ("We," of course, is the first person, plural). Had I used the third person plural, I would have referred to myself as "they," which would make absolutely no sense or indicate a serious psychological disorder.
I'm just happy I avoided my initial inclination to employ the imperfect subjunctive tense or the more daunting future subjunctive tense, feats of writing so perilous they are not usually attempted without a net.
While on the subject of physical and mental disorders, I should apologize for lumping chronic fatigue syndrome with some other made-up afflictions in a recent column. A reader pointed out that chronic fatigue syndrome is a real infirmity that affects a lot of people.
I did not mean to demean people with CFS any more than I would make fun of someone suffering from rickets or scurvy. And because I suffer from retention deficit disorder, pre-traumatic stress syndrome (the fear that many bad things are about to happen) and a host of other maladies of my own invention, I'd be the last person to deprive someone of being clinically tired.
WHILE I'M apologizing, I guess I should say I'm sorry to the woman who thought I was referring to her when I wrote recently about the dangers of food sold by roadside vendors. Out of the many people who sell laulau, pickled onions and pasteles on the roads, this particular woman felt I was specifically alleging her food was unfit for consumption. She told my editor I had cost her $5,000 in sales, to which I gasped, "Man, that's-a-lotta-laulaus!"
The truth is that I was merely commenting on a well-publicized state Health Department warning about the dangers of roadside food and mentioned no specific vendors. While I'd like to think that "Honolulu Lite" is so widely read by aficionados of roadside cuisine that a mere reference in one column could bring down a food empire, I sadly can't claim that. I suspect that the widely broadcast Health Department warnings probably put some people off their pasteles, if only for a few days.
Oh, yeah. The big thing in the kitchen? It's called a "refrigerator." Or is it "Boomer"?
See the Columnists section for some past articles.
Charles Memminger, winner of National Society of Newspaper Columnists awards, appears Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. E-mail cmemminger@starbulletin.com
