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Some days are for blogging. Other days, like this one, are for editing and formatting. I’ll be back next week. But if I’m not, just read this post again.

Chocolate, Vinegar, and Ashes

We’ve finally made it to the half-way point of February, which has the nerve to include an extra day this year. I realize if you live in the Southern Hemisphere, this milestone is not a huge cause of celebration for you, but if like me, you are located in the Northern Hemisphere, February is the last great stronghold of dreaded winter, and you know, it hasn’t really been that bad, at least not in my little corner of the world.

That’s probably because it’s been busy. The month started with that famous rodent prognosticator Punxsutawney Phil failing to see his shadow, allegedly a sign that spring is not a long six weeks away, but is in fact right around the corner in just a quick six weeks or so. 

If you want to keep the good times rolling, apparently today (February 15) is World Hippo Day. I
mage by Don Orchard from Pixabay

Then last Sunday, the Kansas City Chiefs won the Superbowl, which was a big deal here in the Great State of Missouri, and I guess also for fans of Taylor Swift. In case you are not familiar with Midwestern geography, Kansas City is located in both Kansas and Missouri. The Chiefs represent the latter. And in case you have been fortunate enough to escape the hoopla, Taylor Swift is dating a Chief, so she’s been at a lot of the games, including this one, over which there was much ado made.

Then came Pancake Day, followed by Ash Wednesday, which this year fell on Valentine’s Day, a holiday that celebrates chocolate and overpriced roses (both sharply discounted today, in case you forgot).

Of course Valentine’s Day isn’t so special for everyone. It can be a tough day if everyone else seems to have a special someone and you don’t. But it could also be worse, because it turns out people knew how to be mean to one another even before the invention of the internet.

Valentine’s Day has been celebrated in some capacity as a day of love since the early 15th century, but card makers didn’t get in on the action until about 1840. That’s when mass produced Valentines hit the market, and when they did, not all of them were nice. Sure, you could find a beautifully constructed card with a sweet romantic poem on the inside and address it to your sweetheart, but on the shelf next to it, you might just find what came to be known as a vinegar Valentine.

These were more cheaply made, tended to feature grotesque drawings and included rude suggestions and insults. If that wasn’t bad enough, they also went through the mail anonymously with postage to be paid by the recipient. At the height of their popularity millions of such sour Valentine’s greetings were sold in both the US and England, and in the mid-19th century, they made up about half of the Valentine’s Day card market. 

Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons

What isn’t entirely known is whether a large percentage of these might have been viewed as friendly jokes, but what is true is that it’s harder to find well preserved examples of them than it is their sickeningly lovey-dovey counterparts. That could be because they tended to be cheaper and made of flimsy materials. Or it could be that people didn’t feel particularly compelled to hang onto the insults.

Thankfully, it’s not as common to find an insulting Valentine’s card today because as a species, humans have evolved past the point of sending anonymous hate through the mail. Instead we create false social media profiles and spew it on the internet. As God intended.

Anyway, I hope you had a good February 14th, free of vinegary insults, and that you got from it what you hoped—to eat chocolate and feel loved or to don ashes and reflect on the weight of sin and death. Or both. Either way, the end of February is in sight. And I don’t think it’s really going to be that bad.

Challenge Accepted

There’s a rumor running around out there on the Internet where, as everyone knows, all things are true, that William Shakespeare invented more than 1,700 words of the English language. If one considers that the Modern English of Shakespeare’s day was a fairly young language, then it makes sense that new words might have been developing pretty fast. And if you’ve ever met a writer, and particularly a poet, then you’ve probably noticed that they do occasionally invent new words or more likely, new uses of old ones. There’s no question Shakespeare did his fair share of that.

Challenge accepted.

Also roaming around on the Internet lately is a fun challenge in which three columns of insulting Shakespearean words can be combined to come up with a single devastating slight to use in your next piece of writing. Most recently posted by The Writer’s Circle, this was issued as a challenge to me by a friend who knows I’m a writer who likes a good challenge as much as a like a good old timey insult.

Of course I’m only assuming these columns of words show up somewhere among the nearly 29,000 unique words spread across Shakespeare’s forty three surviving works. There are no citations, and I’m not going to take the time to search for them, because regardless of their origin, they make up some pretty fantastic insults.

Still, it’s worth noting I think that if Shakespeare invented 1,700 new words, that means his works contained roughly 6% unique words that would have been entirely unfamiliar to his audience.

Now, because I enjoy a challenge, I certainly don’t mind reading a work that is going to make me pick up a dictionary once in a while, but if I have to look up 6% of the unique words I encounter, I’m going to find myself pretty quickly frustrated by the beslubbering hasty-witted joithead who wrote them.

There’s no doubt in my mind that a brilliant insult is forming behind those eyes. Attributed to John Taylor, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

It’s worse than that, too, because the first English-language dictionary wasn’t put together until more than a century after the saucy doghearted coxcomb of a poet William Shakespeare produced his venerated works.

The Oxford English Dictionary, which provides the written origin of English words, wasn’t even attempted until the second half of the nineteenth century and wasn’t completed until 1928. This thanks to somewhere around three thousand contributors who meticulously hunted through centuries of English language works to determine that 1,700 words or so probably came from the mind of that one old English playwright/poet that everyone had actually heard of.

In other words, the editors and contributors of the OED, while dedicated and deserving of our respect and thanks, may have occasionally been loggerheaded tickle-brained foot-lickers when it came to Shakespeare. Arizona State University English professor Jonathan Hope has been particularly effective in pointing out that OED contributors had more access to and read more carefully from Shakespeare’s works than from those of other writers who now in the digital age, we can more easily discover used quite a few of The Bard’s newfangled words before he did.

Just eleven more weeks until the release of my new historical mystery! I can’t share the cover just yet, but this picture gives a hint about the book, which contains no Shakespearean insults and probably very few made up words.
Photo by Winfred C. Porter, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

I don’t think that discovery necessarily takes anything away from Shakespeare’s works or his influence on English literature and language. In reality, I think it makes him better, because he wasn’t asking his dictionary-deficient audience to puzzle out what he was trying to say. That joy he reserved for the mewling folly-fallen gudgeons in future high school classrooms.

To the audience of his day, and to those who care to notice today, what he did was use words well. And while he probably didn’t use most of the words in this handy kit in quite the same combinations I’ve attempted to use them in this post, there’s no question the man knew his way around an insult.

And now I challenge you to use one in the comments.

0p3N SE$@me!

Once upon a time in a Persian town, there were two brothers. One was a much better hacker than the other. The first brother stumbled on a password, carelessly scribbled on a sticky note and stuck to the underside of a keyboard. Thus he was able to open a secret door, sneak into a cave filled with stolen treasure, and take a pouch of coins, small enough not to be noticed. 

If I’m honest, I relate to the second brother. Not that I would steal gold from someone’s cave, but if my life depended on my recall of a password, I’d be in trouble. Maxfield Parrish, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The second brother, learning of this success, decided he’d go a little bigger, hacked his way into the cave, loaded himself and a bunch of mules down with enough treasure that it would most certainly be missed, and then promptly forgot the password to get back out of the cave. Then the thieves who’d stolen the treasure to begin with, returned to the cave and did a little hacking of their own.

It’s a familiar story of course, added to the collection of Middle Eastern tales One Thousand and One Nights in the eighteenth century by French translator Antoine Galland who heard the tale from Syrian storyteller Hanna Diyab. It also feels a little bit like the story of my life. 

I don’t mean the part about the hacking. Rest assured, I have no skills whatsoever in that area. Most of the time I can’t even remember my own passwords. I have zero brainspace left over for yours, even if I overhear you loudly proclaim them at the hidden door leading to your treasure trove.

In fact, were you to leave your password written down on a sticky note underneath your keyboard, your biggest concern should be that I would mistype it enough times that I’d accidentally lock you out of your cave. And if I ever ask you the name of your first pet, I assure you, I’m just curious. Also, I’ll probably forget that, too.

Can’t be too careful.
Image by S K from Pixabay

Like most of us I have a pretty contentious relationship with passwords. I recognize they are necessary. So much of our lives are stored digitally now and it is certainly important to safeguard our privacy and our treasure from unscrupulous people with enough skills and mules to try to steal it. 

But I also feel like it’s a little much. For example, why exactly do I need a password to protect my popcorn rewards at my local movie theater? Are there a lot of hackers who are anxious to steal my $2 off coupon? And do I care enough to dedicate already pretty crowded memory space to a unique password made up of a minimum of ten characters that must include both upper and lower case letters, a number, a symbol, a sign of the zodiac, a knock-knock joke, and a blood sacrifice? 

Also, it’s February 1, which means there are approximately 12 weeks to go before the launch of my new historical mystery. Cover reveal coming soon!

The experts, who I assume in some cases are the hackers themselves, say the era of passwords may be coming to an end anyway. In the coming decades the whole system may be replaced entirely by biometrics. As often as the fingerprint scanner on my phone fails and I have to either put in a password or wait thirty seconds and try again to see if my thirty-second-older fingerprint works any better, I’m not yet convinced that will be a huge improvement.

But in the meantime, we will just have to hustle to stay a step ahead of the hackers with our wily strings of ever-changing mixed-up characters. To aid in that effort, I am reminding you that today, February 1, is apparently Change Your Password Day. I suspect that, like me, you have too many passwords floating around in your head to remember such a thing. So, you know, take a little time today to change up your one thousand and one passwords and be proactive in protecting your vital information. And your popcorn coupons.

If Not for a Boatload of Pirates

It’s been a long, cold week or so in my corner of the world as temperatures plunged to the kind of face-freezing levels that cause businesses to delay opening, schools to cancel classes, and mamas of stir-crazy little ones to go just a little bit crazy themselves. I have one teenager at home and no little ones anymore, but I do remember such days, and I understand your pain.

Yesterday we finally warmed up, our precipitation became much less solid, temperatures climbed all the way into the mid-40° range, and mamas rejoiced as kids went back to school. Today we’re expecting to be maybe a couple of degrees cooler than that, but still it feels downright balmy compared to 0° with a windchill of -15° and Monday’s ⅛ to ¼ inch of ice that made the 3 mile drive my son would normally make to school treacherous enough I was grateful for the cancellation.

For the non-American readers who might be into this kind of thing, I’ll translate the previous paragraph. Yesterday topped out at around 7° Celsius and today will likely be only a couple of degrees cooler, which does feel pretty refreshing after temperatures as low as -17.778° C with a windchill around -26.1111° C and anywhere from 3.175 to 6.35 mm of ice, enough to make even a 4.82803 kilometer drive pretty dicey.

Image by newsong from Pixabay

Personally, I don’t think going metric is an improvement, but I suppose it all depends on what your brain is used to, and I recently learned that had it not been for a boatload of pirates, we might all be speaking the same measurement language.

That’s because in 1793, then US Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson was looking for a solution to the problem of inconsistent measurement systems in use throughout the new nation that made doing business both at home and abroad a little bit of a confusing hot mess. As a man who was interested in most things French following a successful revolution in which France had been a crucial ally, Jefferson was most intrigued by their newfangled base-ten measuring system.

In hopes of learning more and implementing such a logical and useful set of measurements in the US, Jefferson eagerly awaited the arrival of Joseph Dombey, a French physician and botanist who had been tasked by the National Assembly to bring its American friends a meter long copper bar and a copper grave (soon renamed the kilogram).

To be fair, if a bunch of pirates sent this to me, I probably wouldn’t know what to do with it either. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The weather did not cooperate with Dombey’s planned journey and his ship was forced south into the Caribbean where pirates attacked and took the scientist hostage. He died in captivity, but his luggage, marked for the US Secretary of State survived. Much delayed, it was eventually delivered into the hands of Jefferson’s replacement Edmund Jennings Randolph who had no idea what to do with it.

Without a proper introduction to the metric system, the US ended up adopting a standardized reformed British Imperial system of weights and measures in 1824 and all subsequent attempts to move entirely to the metric system, which yes, we do realize makes a lot more sense, have been unsuccessful.

We do scientific research, medical treatment, international business, and soda bottle purchasing in metric, but there’s a 100 yard football field at the high school several miles from my home and as long as the temperature stays above freezing, which happens at 32°, and we don’t get two feet of snow or a quarter inch of ice on the roads, my son will use much less than a gallon of gasoline to drive an approximately 2,700 lbs. car to get there. Because that’s how his brain works, too.

And because of pirates.

Abbott of the Stanley Cup

It has come to my attention recently that there is a trend in the world of drinking vessels. It’s all the rage and has frankly gotten a little out of hand, this bizarre obsession that has captured the enthusiasm of people all over the globe and has even caught the attention of celebrity.

I’m speaking of course of the cups made from human skulls that litter our history like the red Solo cups of last night’s frat party. 

I wouldn’t camp out in a Target parking lot for it, but that’s one fancy cup. Nicolas Perrault III, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

It all started about 15,000 years ago in a cave in Somerset, England where ancient human remains include skulls that show signs of being carefully cleaned of bodily gunk and intentionally smoothed around the edges to offer a comfortable drinking experience for those who are into that kind of thing.

At this point you might be asking who would be into that sort of thing. It turns out maybe a good number of people, because skull cups have been dug up from lots of cultures and lots of time periods throughout Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Writings about such things abound, or at least exist from multiple sources, which is significant when considering ancient texts.

Why people might have chosen to drink from human skulls is a little tougher to determine. Most researchers assume it was an act of ceremony, whether honoring the dead or drinking the blood of an enemy. It’s difficult to know for sure.

Rumor has it, Byron also wanted to make a cup with his friend Percy Bysshe Shelley’s skull, but his family said no. Then Mary Shelley allegedly kept her husband’s heart in a drawer. As one does. National Portrait Gallery, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Perhaps there’s an answer in one of the more recent and high profile celebrity uses of a skull cup from the early 19th century when a gardener uncovered a human skeleton at Newstead Abbey, the home of the bad boy of English poetry Lord Byron. 

Byron did what any slightly imbalanced hot mess of a celebrity would do and took the skull of what he assumed was “some jolly friar or monk” to an (I have to think surprised) artisan to commission a skull cup. The poet then dubbed himself “Abbott of the Skull,” drank to his heart’s content, and wrote a poem about how it’s better for a skull to hold wine than worm castings.

So it was a noble pursuit. Or perhaps Lord Byron just wanted to stay really well hydrated like all of the people who are losing their minds right now over the Stanley Quencher. This steel vacuum cup, with reusable straw, holds up to 64 fluid ounces, fits nicely in a standard cup holder, causes stampedes at Target every time there’s a new limited edition collaborative design released, and keeps the blood of your enemies warm for hours.

Okay, so they do look like pretty great cups, and while I still wouldn’t camp out in the Target parking lot, I might be lying if I said I didn’t kind of want one. Photo courtesy of my niece who is clearly much cooler than I am.

Honestly, I don’t understand either trend, but there’s no doubt the Stanley Cup has become a sensation recently. The obsession apparently started with TikTok and has spawned a Stanley Cup Buy, Sell, Trade, and Raffle group on Facebook with more than 68,000 members, as well as another group called Stanley Cup Hunters Anonymous Support for Spouses. 

The wild fad has spurred sales for the Stanley company, which has been in the business of making steel water bottles since 1913, to grow from $94 million in 2020 to $750 million in 2023. 

If you camped out at Target to get one and you want to make a few bucks, the resale value of $45 limited edition Quenchers is currently in the neighborhood of $200. Given that Lord Byron’s skull cup sold at auction a few years ago for only somewhere around £1,000, that feels like a pretty substantial markup. 

As far as I could find, no one has yet started penning verses about the Stanley Quencher. My promised year of not attempting to write poetry is over, so I might see if I can come up with something about staying ultra-hydrated by sipping the well insulated blood of my enemies through a straw. “Abbott of the Stanley Cup” sure has a nice ring to it. Maybe the company would consider a collab and etch my poem on the outside of a limited edition Quencher available only at Target.

Irrelevant to Mental Development

On December 21, 1913, a journalist by the name of Arthur Wynne started a fad and angered a lot of librarians. Wynne worked for the New York World where he served as editor of the “Fun” section of the newspaper. Looking for something different to liven up the section, Wynne drew inspiration from a variety of word puzzles he’d encountered and came up with something he called a word cross puzzle, involving clues for placing words into blank squares that made up a diamond pattern.

Readers liked it, even when it was later renamed a crossword puzzle. In fact, they liked it so much that they flooded library reference desks to seek answers, which led to the general grumbling of librarians that serious researchers and scholars were being pushed out by frivolous puzzle doers engaged in what the New York Times (home since 1941 to arguably the most famous of gold standard crossword puzzles) called nothing more than “a primitive sort of mental exercise . . . irrelevant to mental development.”

Image by Marjon Besteman from Pixabay

Regardless of the naysayers, Americans were hooked, and as the world grew darker through the start of World War I, these silly little word puzzles became a moment of levity in the midst of the heaviness found throughout the rest of the newspaper pages. Within a very few years, most newspapers across the United States and many throughout the world were regularly printing crosswords.

In 1924 Simon & Schuster began publishing its big book of them, which led to the formation of the Amateur Crossword Puzzle League of America, a collection of dedicated crossword enthusiasts who set out to lay down some (much needed?) ground rules that standardized the puzzles.

I honestly didn’t know there was an Amateur Crossword Puzzle League of America before I began researching for this post. I also hadn’t known the word cruciverbalist, which in case you ever need to know while working on a crossword puzzle, is the proper term for a crossword enthusiast. I am not a cruciverbalist, but I know a few of them, and if I have more important things to put off, a crossword puzzle isn’t the worst way to waste a little time.

And so it is that on this one hundred and tenth anniversary of the modern-day crossword puzzle, just four days before Christmas when you’re probably starting to panic a little about all those holiday things you need to get done, I decided to gift you with a primitive sort of mental distraction that will be entirely irrelevant to your mental development. You’re welcome.

All of these clues are taken from frivolous information found in posts of Christmas past from this blog’s archives. Of course you can always rush out to your library reference desk, too. Just please don’t tell the librarians I sent you.

Not for a Million Years: An Encouragement

On December 8, 1903, then director of the Smithsonian Institute Samuel Langley attempted to send a piloted heavier-than-air flying contraption into the sky. It failed, and prompted a New York Times editorial that expressed a hope that Langley might put his substantial scientific prowess and attention to better use. The Times, it seems, subscribed to the opinion of George Melville, Engineer-in-Chief of the US Navy, who wrote adamantly that fanciful flying machines were “wholly unwarranted, if not absurd.”

It also wasn’t the first time Langley had failed to send a piloted heavier-than-air flying contraption into the sky. That was on October 7th of 1903, when his “aerodrome” first crashed into the Potomac. Two days after the incident, an earlier New York Times editorial compared the development of human flight to the evolution of bird flight and predicted that it would take “from one million to ten million years” for man to accomplish the same thing. 

Daniels John T, Kill Devil Hills Life Saving Station, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The very day that editorial hit the newsstands Orville Wright recorded in his journal that he and his brother Wilbur had begun assembly of their version of a piloted heavier-than-air flying machine. Sixty-six days later (one-hundred twenty years ago today), their Kitty Hawk Flyer crashed into the sand after only 3.5 seconds of sort-of-flight. 

But then after a few days for repairs, on December 17, 1903, the Wright brothers took turns successfully piloting their Flyer four separate times making them, according to most experts, the first people to do it, just barely beating that New York Times prediction by one million years minus sixty-nine days. 

My son told me this story, several months ago now, and I tucked it away for another time. I share it in this space today, on the anniversary not of the Wright brothers’ success, but on their initial failure, because from time to time I think we can all use a reminder that no matter the absurdity of our goals, or the lack of faith from those around us, or the small failures we encounter along the way, the day may be just ahead of us when we will take flight.

Not a Nut

In January of 1942, Pennsylvania dental surgeon and amateur inventor Lytle S. Adams had a big idea to share with the United States government. Like many Americans, I’m sure, in the weeks following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Adams had big feelings to work through, a strong sense of patriotism, and an overwhelming desire to help defeat the darkness then spreading through the world.

He knew just how to do it, too. All he needed was the attention of President Roosevelt and about a million bats.

Mexican free-tailed bats emerging from Carlsbad Cavern. Nick Hristov, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

A recent vacation to Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico to watch thousands upon thousands of bats take flight and begin their nightly bug-hunting expedition had inspired Adams to wonder if a million bats might carry a million tiny incendiary devices to roost in a million hard to reach places within the flammable buildings throughout Japan.

Adams happened to be acquainted with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, and so when he sent his cruel, disturbing, and possibly kind of genius idea to the White House, it made it to the president’s desk where Roosevelt wrote in a memo: “This man is not a nut. It sounds like a perfectly wild idea but is worth looking into.”

With approval of the project, later known as Project X-Ray, Adams began assembling a team of specialists from a wide variety of fields. The list included mammalogist Dr. Jack von Bloeker, as well as Harvard chemist and inventor of napalm Dr. Theodore Fieser. It also included a pilot-turned-actor, a one-time hotel manager, a fitness expert, a former gangster, a lobster fisherman, and a couple of high school student lab assistants, which sounds a bit like the set up to a joke. And in case you forgot, it’s worth mentioning again that the project leader was a dentist.

The team got to work and designed a tube carrier that could hold 1,040 Mexican free-tailed bats, kept just cold enough to maintain hibernation during transport, deploy a parachute at four thousand feet above the ground, and open to release the newly awakened bats, each with fifteen to eighteen grams of napalm glued to their furry chests.

Upon testing, some of the bats dropped to the ground having never woken up, and others flew off into the sunset neglecting to roost, but the bat bombs weren’t entirely unsuccessful. They did burn down a mock Japanese Village. Unfortunately, a handful of accidental releases also managed to completely destroy the Carlsbad auxiliary airfield.

Then after the not-yet-perfected project got shuffled around from branch to branch within the US military for a while, another secret weapons project came to light. While the atom bomb was certainly no less cruel, disturbing, and possibly genius than the bat bomb, it did overshadow Project X-Ray, which was cancelled in late 1944, much to the relief of a million Mexican free-tailed bats.

I don’t often write in this space about the more serious moments in history, at least not very directly, but today marks the anniversary of one of the deadliest attacks ever committed against the United States, and the beginning of this nation’s official participation in World War II. This year more than any other, I feel connected to that moment in history. Largely that’s because this past summer my family and I visited the Pearl Harbor National Memorial in Honolulu.

There we stood silent above the watery grave of the USS Arizona where the bones of many trapped servicemen still lie, and watched as small amounts of oil bubbled up to the surface of water that eighty-two years ago today was covered in flames. It’s a somber place that leaves one with big feelings to work through, a strong sense of patriotism, and an overwhelming desire to help defeat the darkness now spreading through the world.

Because I don’t know about you, but to me the world is feeling like a pretty dark place right now. I’m certainly not prepared to assemble a motley crew and sentence a million poor little bats to death, but I can almost understand the sentiment behind Lytle Adams’s big idea. I might even agree with Franklin Roosevelt’s assessment that the man was perhaps not a nut.

Lemons for Christmas

I’m a big fan of lemons. I don’t mean that I cut them open and suck on them like a crazy person. I acknowledge that they are sour and, on their own, pretty gross. But I do use lemons quite a bit when I cook, to cut that fishy flavor this corn-fed Midwestern gal doesn’t always appreciate, or to add a bit of acidic zing when the mood strikes and I want to feel a little fancy and channel my inner Food Network star.

Last year for Christmas my husband even got me a couple of small lemon trees in pots to grow in a sunny spot off to the side of my kitchen. Over the summer, the trees enjoyed the hot soupy atmosphere of our Missouri back deck (as did I), and now that it’s turned cold again they have settled back indoors, leafier and prettier, and probably no closer to actually producing fruit.

Fancy. Image by -Rita- und mit from Pixabay

That’s okay. They’ll get there. Or they won’t. I’ll have fun trying anyway, and in the meantime, I can always buy a nice California lemon at the grocery store. I pick them out carefully. I like my lemons on the larger side, heavy for their size with a slight give when gently squeezed and with a nice fragrance.

I’m good at picking out lemons. Both at the grocery store and, unfortunately, at the car lot. I posted once before about our 2020 Subaru Outback, not long after it left us stranded on the side of the interstate while on family vacation with about twenty thousand miles on the odometer and a transmission that had catastrophically failed, leaving us down a vehicle for more than a month. I wish I could say that after the transmission issues the car hasn’t given us any more problems. Alas, it’s been something of a lemon. And not the kind that makes fish taste better.

It’s been a lemon more in that way that a mid-nineteenth century guy might have referred to a tart or undesirable woman. Or like the way a person in the early part of the twentieth century might refer to getting a rotten deal. Or an awful lot like when, according to Mental Floss, a used car dealer was said in the Oakland Tribune in 1923 to be pleased that he’d finally gotten rid of a lemon.

Not my dog. Or my car. Image by AI ART made in Germany to produce images for people from Pixabay

To be fair, the salesman who sold us our Outback probably did not knowingly sell us a lemon. It was brand new at the time, and Subarus have a reputation of being solid, reliable cars that hold onto their value. I mean their ads tend to feature good looking adventurous people driving into rugged landscapes with their good looking adventurous dogs, tails wagging and tongues and ears flapping happily out the rolled down windows. “Love,” they say, “Is what makes a Subaru a Subaru.”

They certainly don’t label their vehicles as lemons, like Volkswagen decided to do in 1960. The printed ad displayed the image of a new, seemingly perfect (though vaguely ridiculous as the VW Beetle has always been), car labeled: “Lemon.” The ad copy went on to explain that an imperfection in the chrome strip on the glove compartment that wouldn’t likely have been noticed by the consumer, had caught the attention of one of the 3,389 quality inspectors, and that the car had been deemed unfit to sell until the problem could be corrected.

The yellow ones even kind of look like lemons. Vauxford, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/
licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The conclusion of course, is that a company with this level of attention to detail could be trusted to produce a car that will not only hold its value, but will also probably not result in a mandatory programming recall, a not-yet-covered-by-recall $1400 repair to its engine, a class action lawsuit regarding a parasitic battery problem the company has yet to find a solution to, an inexplicable break down at the intersection four blocks from home the day before Thanksgiving, and a family stranded on the side of the interstate when they should be on their way to the lake.

Despite being the project car of Adolf Hitler, Volkswagen and its Beetle enjoyed a good reputation among American consumers for a long time following the lemon ad campaign, though feelings toward the company have maybe soured a little since it got caught cheating on its emissions testing a few years back.

Subaru also has inspired a lot of consumer loyalty with its reputation for quality and service. I know that because every time I mention how frustrated I am with this car, I am flooded with comments from other Subaru drivers who absolutely love their cars. Even the tow truck driver on the day before Thanksgiving when mechanic shops are preparing to close down for the long weekend, told me how much he loves Subarus as he loaded my incapacitated car onto the back of his truck and a police officer directed traffic around us.

I realize it’s not Christmas yet, but this really couldn’t wait. When the day arrives, we’ll put a bow on it or something and pretend to be surprised.

And I get it. Sort of. We owned a previous Subaru Outback and it was a great car. We had lots of adventures in it with our good looking dog whose ears and tongue flapped happily out the rolled down window. Well, before he got carsick anyway. He’s not a great traveler.

But this year for Christmas (and for many Christmases and birthdays and anniversaries to come I suspect), instead of lemons, which I’m almost confident my trees will one day produce, we have traded in our 2020 Subaru Outback and purchased a Honda CR-V. The car has a great reputation, and I’m feeling hopeful that this Christmas, I’m not getting a lemon.