Waving Goodbye To The Five

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-by Alan Allen

This Just In...

There was a baby born several months ago in a distant land located in some remote, pointy corner of the globe. I can’t remember the name of the country, but I do recall its shape resembling that of a half eaten croissant. At first glance this child appeared to be a normal, healthy, baby girl, born to healthy, normal looking parents. By normal I mean that there were no antennae, and each parent had a face. But three weeks after bringing the offspring home from the hospital, mom and dad noticed something a bit off.  The baby had 6 fingers and toes on each hand and foot respectively.

 In scientific terms this is known as “polydactylism” from the Ancient Greek. “Polus” meaning "many”,”daktulos” meaning "finger" and “ism” referring to anything that is deemed as being something as opposed to being nothing.

When I first heard this story I thought, ”That’s just gross”, but my repulsion soon turned to sympathy when I realized the severity of the awkward phase that child was going to go through. Several minutes after that, the fundamental problem with this issue hit me. How could the hospital staff miss something like this? We’ve all heard horror stories about doctors amputating the wrong leg or removing a lung instead of a tooth. These things happen all the time. But this?

Then I remembered the time I saw my first newborn. When the vomiting stopped, and I got past the horror of seeing a head that looked as though it had just been removed from a pot of boiling water, I noticed how tiny its hands were. Really tiny. Like grains of rice stuck into a ball of Silly Putty. Chances are someone like myself would have easily overlooked the six-digit anomaly, (I was outside once and actually missed a solar eclipse), but these folks are trained professionals. And although the nurses are probably on the lookout for third nipples and making sure there’s a head, count the fingers man.

 Polydactylism is not as rare as one might think. It actually occurs in 1 in 500 children.  It is a dormant gene on the father’s side, and the resulting abnormalities are usually just “lopped” off once the child has had its first birthday. This makes circumcision seem like a haircut.

In most cases, these extra appendages are misaligned, non-functional, and tend to be more of an annoyance than an asset once the child starts taking piano lessons; however, this particular case is rare in that this child’s’ extra digits were fully operational, each one working independently of the others. They were arranged in an unobtrusive, normal fan-like progression on the hands and feet and were not even noticed until the girl was almost three weeks old.

Down The Road

They say that over the course of the next million years or so, there exists the remote possibility that six fingers and toes will become genetically dominant. No doubt this will create a problem for the glove industry, but more importantly it gives rise to a more serious dilemma…what to name the extra finger and toe.

As for naming the extra toe, I’m not seeing an issue here. “Toe naming” has never really been one of our top priorities. “Big Toe”, “Little Toe”, “That toe next to the other one that takes a sharp left”. Not very creative. Even the nursery rhyme just calls them “Little Piggies”. I don’t see a problem with having six Piggies as opposed to five.

But our fingers are a different story. They have become intertwined with our everyday existence. Next to shedding gills, I think it’s safe to say that the advanced use of our digits is one of mankind’s more important evolutionary breakthroughs. Of course some would argue that language is what separates us from the herd, but language is more of a cultural, anthropological advancement, which progressed at varying rates according to the needs of individual societies. Give me a fist over speech any day. I’d rather be able to punch a man in the throat than have to form a sentence in order to communicate with him. Hands down (ha!), our fingers have become our primary source of non-verbal communication.

So what do we call the new addition? Since we’ve already classified each of our existing fingers, I’m assuming that we’ll probably use this as a basis for naming the new one.

The Contenders

Let’s start with the thumb. Sure other species have them, but ours have evolved in ways that allow us to use them for other activities other than just “holding on”. A thumb can express positivityness as in, “I thought that movie was quite enjoyable”, or negativityness as in, “What a piece of garbage”. If you’re lucky, it can get you a ride when you’ve run out of gas. It can pull out a plum and light a cigar. We can suck it; twiddle it, flip a coin and can take a man’s eye out with it. It can wrestle other thumbs and we can put an entire person under it. Just ask my ex. Even though I think an extra thumb would look freakishly interesting, our thumb shouldn’t have to share the spotlight with a second thumb. There can only be one Thumbkin.

Let’s move on to the “Index” finger or “Pointer” if you’re under six. Next to the thumb, this is the finger with the most versatility. It gave birth to the index card and a family of sisters. It lets a sports fan show the world that his team is #1. It also lets me point at that same guy and say, “You’re an idiot”. When it collaborates with my thumb, I’m letting you know that everything is OK, but when I use it to make a circular motion next to my ear, I’m letting you know you’re nuts. Perhaps a second index finger could be assigned the sole task of picking your nose. “Picker Finger” might work. But that would exclude all the people who don’t engage in this activity.  The new limb can’t possibly be assigned a function that is practiced by only a percentage of the population. So that’s out. “Pointer #2” or “Second Index finger”? Too wordy. Onward. 

 Next in line we have the Middle Finger. This is a problem. With the introduction of a sixth finger, the term “Middle Finger” will immediately become obsolete. There is no “middle” in the world of even numbers. The Brady’s never had a middle child, a football game can’t have a middle quarter, and none of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse could ever say, “I wanna ride in the middle.” Our middle finger will lose all that it has worked so hard to achieve, and with it shall mark the passage of one of the great fingers in history. It is “The” finger. “The Flip Off”, “The Bird”, “The Toss”. It is so special that all other fingers bow down before it when it is called into service. Never before has a finger given so much and asked for so little in return, and one day perhaps, evolution will callously return the favor by forcing us to strip it of its identity. Mathematical constraints will kill the Middle Finger. Rest in peace my special f*cking friend.

Let’s skip ahead to the Pinky. A second pinky would be like a second little toe. You’d be stubbing that thing every day. It would stick out like…well a sore thumb, getting caught on and in everything. You’d type faster, but would you be more efficient? I dont   thinnk so.. This leaves us with the final finger….the “Ring Finger”.

The ring finger can bite me. It is a haughty, presumptuous, pretentious, self absorbed, arrogant little digit whose sole purpose is to sport some overpriced scrap of metal that says, “We found someone who understands us, who gets us, someone who gives us nicknames, and “to do” lists. Let me tell you something. If the middle finger could give “The Finger” to the ring finger, I’m pretty sure it would do so on a regular basis. I have no love for this finger, as it is mostly a supporting cast member. If we are forced to accept a sixth finger, I vote that we should name it “Second Ring Finger”. Knock that high handed, egotistic, pompous little appendage down a bit. Of course we could go with ”Bling Finger”, but then we’d feel obligated to burden it with that garbage. Gold is not my color, so maybe we could ultimately go with something a bit more modest. Something understated yet grand. We could give our new family member a unique identity all its own, bestowing on it a special place amongst its elders. Something like… oh I don’t know….how about “Alan”? I like it. “Alan”. Say it slowly with me, letting it roll off your tongue and waft gently out on hot, unbridled breath, floating effortlessly away as it mixes and mingles in an orgiastic embrace with the cool evening breezes, finally alighting on the ears of a world that is yearning for closure and conciliation. A world which has not seen a hint of human transformation in many an epoch. A world that thirsts for change while desperately clinging to familiarity. A world that is longing for an end to the madness, an answer to the insanity and an acceptance of inevitable evolution. “Alan”…oh yes.

Now that has a nice ring to it.

The Banana Wall

A Tale From The Manly Side Of The Muffin Pan

-Alan Allen

After noticing a banana melting into my kitchen counter, a friend of mine once said, “You know you can freeze those things and use them for banana bread right?” That was six years ago. You know what I’ve done ever since? Saved every banana that has begun to show the slightest sign of decay. You know what I haven’t done since? Shown any inclination towards making banana bread. 

One of my problems is that I have issues with splitting up the banana bunches, so I’m obliged to buy no less than eight bananas at a time. I justify my purchase by reassuring myself that my potassium level is probably too low. Single digit low. But honestly, who can eat eight bananas a week? That’s why they invented pills. Bananas are like the lasagna of the fruit world. Eat a bowl of cereal…unbutton the pants.  Right now I’m looking at a freezer filled with no less then twenty pounds of those things.

The other problem is that I don’t bake. The whole affair is way too messy for me.

I have better things to do than spend an afternoon wiping up fallout from rogue clouds of flour and herding runaway sugar granules with a sponge. Cleaning should never take longer than cooking, and cooking should never take an entire day. If I want my kitchen looking like construction zone, I’ll cook in the dark.

Then there’s the measuring. Main courses… no problem. Add some of this, toss in some of that, chop, sprinkle, rub, cook. But baking requires precision with cups, spoons, lines and fractions, and since I live in a “High Altitude” recipe zone, I’m looking at an afternoon involving some form of trigonometry. No muffin is worth that, and if this is what Professor Funny Pants meant when he told me back in college that I’d find a use for it one day, I want my fifty-six thousand dollars back.

At friend’s houses, I’ll usually take the liberty of checking out their medicine cabinet. I don’t want to take anything; I just want to know what they’re taking. And if the opportunity affords, I’ll take a peek at the contents of their freezer as well. Again, don’t want to take anything, I’m just nosey. The lineup usually includes a tub of Ice cream, a few mysterious ethnic entrees, several pizzas, and the occasional oddly shaped zippered, gallon bag filled with some sort of liquid. If they were to offer me the same courtesy, they would see nothing more than a wall of brown, rotten fruit.

My banana backlog wouldn’t have been a problem if a hunter pal of mine hadn’t offered to give me half a carcass of elk meat a few weeks ago, but the “Playskool” sized refrigerator in my studio limits any type of Armageddon day hoarding so naturally, a sacrifice was in order.

Luckily for me, every three years or so, the “Girlfriend Wheel” lands on “Baker!” It’s a risk you take whenever you spin that thing, as you never know what you’re going to get.  It once landed midway between “Camping enthusiast” and “Soap opera junkie”. Nothing ruins the solitude of a forest quite like the theme from “Days of our lives” blasting out of the back end of a travel trailer.

The last time I won the “Baker!” category, she insisted that we clear my freezer of the accumulated fodder. I would finally learn the art of making a mess. I would also come to learn that a spatula is actually two very different items with the same name. How can anyone be expected to follow a discipline that has discrepancies like that? But as usual, I accommodated for love. Six hours later we were staring at no less than twenty loaves of sweet smelling, golden brown goodness and after the flour settled, we were ready to sample the rotten fruits of our labor.

We set the table, plated the affair and sat down to give our creation a test run. The color was perfect, the smell sublime, but after the first bite, I realized that something was definitely askew. Apparently I missed the part of the recipe that said, “Remove all moisture”.  Apparently she didn’t. I admit that I don’t have the most widely exposed palette, but I have eaten boots that were more succulent. All that was missing was a shoelace to floss the taste out of my mouth.

Although the episode was a complete failure, there was an upside. The fantastic thing about baking two dozen of anything, is that you can give them away to your former friends. “Morning Steve. Thought I’d give you something that I would never eat.” Since my crew knows that I don’t bake, the blame thankfully fell on the girl, and she went down in history as “That cute, hot little number who should have been a cobbler.”

Needless to say my banana saving days are over. If I ever find myself in another relationship in which my partner enjoys squandering a perfectly good afternoon, she will no doubt be disappointed at my lack of on-hand baking components. I have freed myself from the chains of obligatory fruit hording. My freezer is a much more masculine appliance now. But as I gaze at the neatly wrapped towers of manly, man manna, I am saddened by the fact that not even the mighty elk can endure an indefinite, cryogenic lifestyle. Freezer burn is a horrible end. So as summer approaches, I know that I must fill the propane tank, choose a spatula, and start grilling as soon as possible. I wouldn’t even know where to begin to look for a recipe for elk bread.

Gray is a Color, but Grey is a Colour.

“Some people have a way with words, and other people...oh, not have way.”

 -Steve Martin

“Boy, those French! They have a different word for everything.”

 -Steve Martin

     As a writer, I depend on language to help me write good. Make that more better. Finding the right word is imperative when attempting to convey one’s particular perspective.  Yet as diverse as our language is, we rarely utilize its full potential. There is a strange, vacuous region into which certain words and phrases fall. They lay there, mingling with their colorless counterparts, floundering in a linguistically languid, torpid amalgamation of mediocrity, providing nothing more than a lackluster quiver from which to draw our verbal intimations. That’s stupid. Our words should caress the nuances we wish to purvey. They should dance gingerly and ecstatically with their subject, weaving a threaded tapestry of brilliant, verbal luminosity through the prose into which they have been invited. We have held on to these wearisome morphemes far too long, and like an old shoe, they have been ground to tatters, barely holding on to the glory of their former selves to the point where they hardly look like a shoe at all. “You’re still wearing those?” as in, “You’re still using that?” It is lamentable that we, as creatures who are able to read, speak and occasionally write, have not aspired to coin new, stimulating terms of articulation for everyday locution.

The tech world and cyber community on the other hand, have both done an exemplary job of cooking up new words and phrases to accommodate their needs for exacting descriptions. “Sexting”, “Hotspot” and “Retweet” to name a few. But more often than not, non-geek culture still embraces the tried and true patterns of literary replay, repetition, reiteration and recapitulation. As adults, we tend to hold on to the expressions to which we have grown accustomed. They are reverse comfort food. We are at ease when we hear them flow from our lips, and become unsettled when venturing outside of our adopted style of communication.

Kids (now I sound old), as well, are constantly reinventing language. We are perpetually barraged by modern day, pop culture colloquialisms, which somehow just beg to be used by us older folks. Unfortunately when we hear the vernacular of a twenty-something come out of the mouth of a forty-something, it leaves us with a slightly uncomfortable taste in our ears. It is a verbal comb over. We’re not fooling anyone. Those words are not for us, and we’d best leave well enough alone. However there is a way to afford ourselves a makeover in the language department without aggravating the obvious disparity in age and coolness. And that is…go British. Not all the way mind you, just slightly. I like my teeth. As adults, using phrases like “homey” and “dope” will undoubtedly get us kicked out of the party. No ecstasy for us. But toss in a “chap” and a “brilliant” every once in awhile, and we just seem well traveled.

In keeping with this inability to pawn off current hipster language as my own, I made a pact with myself several months ago, to adopt more British vernacular into my everyday speech. The looks I get from my peers do not convey the “Why are you using that word old man?” sentiment, but rather, “You hardly have any accent at all.” “I lost it in the war” I tell them.

The British have panache with language that can only be envied by us Yankees. In all manners of social interaction, the Limey lingo seems to surpass ours at every turn. I’m not sure how the word “loo” refers to relieving oneself, but it beats the crap out of “bathroom”, or “restroom”. I’m not planning to bathe or rest.  Maybe a quick nap on the toilet, I mean “kip” on the “khazi”, but that’s about it.  And why are we wasting so much time taking the “e-le-va-tor”, when using “the lift” is so much more efficient? And should it still be called a “lift” if it is bringing you down to a lower level? I would prefer taking the “lift” up to my “flat” and taking the “drop” down to the lobby.

A brief example of my newly adopted cant.

After I settled in Saratoga, I went to the store to buy sundries. They arrived by semi-truck, and I paid the cashier with money. But when living in Liverpool, I had to find a “shonky” that sold “bits and bobs”. The “lorry” was late so I had to look “left, right and center” for a “bog roll”. Eventually I found one in a “Paki-shop” and gave the chap a few “quid”.

The relationships that I have with my cohorts have undergone a major overhaul as well. My friend in Phoenix is a fool, but my “mate” from Manchester is merely a “mong”. Sorry for “slagging-off”, but honestly, I can’t stand either of those “lads”. And my neighbor? Complete idiot. That guy never shuts up. But over in South Hampton, he was merely a “sop”, “nakker” and a “twit”. Always gushing from his “gob”.

And finally, Rich in Roswell uses a rubber to diminish his chances of having a baby, while in Raleigh, Reginald will be using it to fix his spelling mistakes.

It’s not that our culture is unable to author more colorful language, it’s just that we tend to opt for more obvious and overt idioms to eliminate the possibility of having our words be misconstrued. Saying “smashing” instead of “awesome” immediately brings to mind images of glass and hammers. We are also lazy. We use the word “great” far too frequently. When compared to how an Englishman might express his affections towards a subject, “great” is a middle of the road, wishy-washy, humdrum modifier. “That milkshake was great, and so is that new record by blahbitty-blah.” There is no dynamic here. No differentiation between sugar and art. How can you throw a dairy product into the same bin as an artistic composition? Yes we use words like “Fantastic, incredible and unbelievable” for varying degrees of greatness, but these words are also tiresome. The milkshake may have been great, but I believe the word you were looking for when describing the album was “Brilliant”. Americans use “brilliant” when describing certain people, but we would be better served if we were to give it greater powers of denotation. Objects should have the opportunity to be brilliant as well. Like this essay.

Another baffling aspect of the American utilization of the English language is our affinity towards corporate product name recognition and usage. From here on out, my days of endorsing capitalistic interests are over. No one is paying me to use brand names when referring to everyday household items, and unless the wigs at Johnson & Johnson start forking over some “dosh”, never again will I put on a Band-Aid, or wrap my leftovers in Saran Wrap. Next time I cut “meself”, or find that I am left with an inordinate supply of “Scrummy nosh”, I’ll apply a “plaster” and wrap that grub in “cling film”. I don’t owe Saran anything. And even though “cotton buds” are a bit more syllabically demanding than “Q-tips”, there is nothing “Q-ey” about them. “Buds” for me thanks.

With this in mind, it’s obvious that not all British slang is exemplary -the term “French Kissing” for example. Although I can’t remember the last time I actually called it “Frenching”, I would much rather “French” someone than “snog” them. “Snogging” sounds like something you do in a parking lot, involving motor oil, a lot of contortion and possibly a seat belt or two. Admittedly the French were probably not the first to shove their tongues down their lover’s throats, but they have the patent on the term and my devotion to the word.

There is one word in particular that the Redcoats have embraced above all others. And that is the word “piss”. The Brits absolutely love the word “piss”. I love writing the word “piss”. Piss, piss, piss, piss, piss. But stateside, it merely refers to anger and urine. The British on the other hand can be “on the piss”, tell you to “piss off”, call you a “piss head”, and open a “brolly” when it’s “pissing down”. They can “take the piss”, call something a “piece of piss”, “piss all over”, be “piss poor”, “piss up” and just “piss about”. I’m sure there are more phrases that I could include in this piss, but I’m late for a piss rally.

The Isle folk also preponderate when it comes to insults. If a bloke wants to put you down, he will have much more verbal ammunition at his disposal than you. Be prepared. Their derisions are more finely tuned, encompassing greater variations in degrees of intensity. We might call someone an ass, idiot and a moron, but ultimately these words all seem to embody identical connotations; however, twat, prat, twit, git, pleg, spacker, spacky, spazmo, spanner, twonk, wally, wazzock, wanker, divvy, joey, mong, nonce, pilchard, pillock, prannet, pranny, prannock, plank, plonker pleb, (and arse), are all tailored to more accurately define someone who, while he or she may in fact be an ass, idiot or moron, possesses certain qualifying traits which put him or her into a more specific sub-category of idiocy.

The written word has the power to add luminosity. Tincture. Iridescence. Carefully chosen lexemes afford us hierarchical intensities, enabling an exalted embellishment of viewpoints and opinions. Whether native or foreign, we have at our disposal, a virtual arsenal of terminology and utterances, and as a man of words, I will utilize these weapons of confabulation to the best of my ability, both in written and spoken form, in order to propagate a more diverse if not totally confusing writing and speaking style.

A perfectly healthy sentence, it is true, is extremely rare. For the most part we miss the hue and fragrance of the thought; as if we could be satisfied with the dews of the morning or evening without their colors, or the heavens without their azure.

 -Henry David Thoreau

*Note: No thesaurus was harmed in the formulation of this discourse.