Homecoming went well this year. The Stags played the Mott Mohicans here and won 49-7.
Stoop Harcourt pulled the “Sensation of the Stag Nation” float in the Saturday parade with that old Allis Chalmers tractor of his. His daughter Lirick was Stag Queen. Thistle Hunnicut was her Lady in Waiting. The Antlerettes were the Queen’s Court.
Mason Harcourt bought their dresses at the Dapper Dan in Waverly. We helped her sew organdy and taffeta pettyflurze on them to accent the plunge line. We stitched wire into the bodices so they wouldn’t sag and let bosom pop out like last year with Kendall Tarbuckle.
Faith said Scooter would turn over in his grave if he knew his granddaughter had ridden from Eighth Street to the stop light with nipple showing. Kendall was mortified, though it hasn’t hurt her social life, has it?
Thank God the wire worked.
The only thing that bothered me this year was, Mason made ’em paint sensation with an “i,” so it read “sinsation.” She got that from a dessert at Chez Clancy’s called Chocolate Sinsation. “It’s sinfully good,” the menu says.
Mason thought it was clever and would punch up the float. But I was thinking during the parade, Did I miss a sermon or something? Since when should we suggest to our young folks that sin is delicious? They’re mixed up enough already!
But that’s just a quibble. The float was as pretty as I’ve seen it in a long time. And the girls were gussied up like little floozies — cute as a bug!
(This Is Stag Country, Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)
“When did you stop beating your wife?”
“Through his mysterious and appealing lectures, they were guided away from the cold sobriety of genuine knowledge into the picturesque realms of pseudoscience….” (Grete de Francesco, “The Power of the Charlatan,” quoted by John Ganz in an opinion piece in the NYTimes)
When the title of this comment occurred to me, I thought it was from some old comedic shtick, akin to “Take my wife… please.” I have no idea when or where I first heard it. On impulse I Googled “When did you stop beating your wife?” It came up as an example of the “loaded question.”
For me, it symbolizes a type of headline that seems to be a staple of clickbait journalism: The provocative assertion posed interrogatively. It’s a come hither device to draw the surfer into an inflamed or tendentious opinion piece. It’s of a piece with headlines that taunt “You won’t believe…,” and those that scream words like “destroy” and “shred” to proclaim the outcome of a tweet skirmish.
I understand the drive to capture audience. It’s hard to write dispassionately and disinterestedly about a topic. Unvarnished reflection isn’t always shiny. The principled urge to write without embellishment fights with the yearning to be noticed.
My contrivance vice tends to be to let a soupçon of swagger creep in, a saucy dash of erudition, wit, or even modesty. Such strutting, besides playing the reader unfairly, compensates for under-confidence in the face of the sheer volume of quality blogging that’s out there.
I resolve to try to: (1) Strive for greater allusiveness and economy of expression; (2) Err oftener on the side of understatement; (3) Refrain from snuffing my own candle.
(Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)