Ahh! I come bearing more pearls of wisdom from Messr. Rosenfeld. I know it’s been a while, for which I apologize, but he’s been absent from work for the last while for various and sundry reasons and thus unable to shower us with his unique brand of malaprops.
Today’s Prosenfeldisms are brought to you by the letter “C”.
A little backstory: P. is originally from Arkansas and thus is full of all sorts of “useful” “information” (by “useful”, I mean “not very” and by “information” I mean “highly dubious stories and conjectures held together with a queer sort of folksy tall tale literary duct tape”) – Arkansans don’t “wash” their clothes, they “worsh” them; Toad Suck, Arkansas’ name’s origins are shrouded in mystery (Is it “sweet water”? “Sugar shack”?); Arkansas was originally spelled phoenetically (“Arkansaw”) but the residents got sick of being made fun of and voted to change the final letter. The list goes on.
Yesterday’s lunch proved particularly fruitful for nuggets of wisdom. We were able to hear about a wide variety of subjects: the differences between “caving” and “spelunking”, P.’s acquisition of a respiratory condition due to bat guano, what it feels like to experience an earthquake underground and why you shouldn’t panic in such a circumstance, the distinction between “French drains” and “French tiles” and their particular relationships to sump pumps, the potential for Sam Walton’s frozen head to be stored in a vast Wal-Mart-run fortress hidden deep within Blanchard Springs Caverns, and why, precisely, “Seal Cave” on the Oregon coast is named as such.
All of these paled in comparison to the final Prosenfeldism of the day. P. was holding forth on one subject or another and attempted to talk about something being “chock full of” something else, except he declined to use standard English pronunciation. Instead of using the soft leading “cha” sound generally associated with “chock”, he used a hard “kah” sound, resulting in a good deal of mirth around the table. P. emphatically insisted that he has always pronounced it as such. Suddenly, Chock Full O’ Nuts coffee took on a whole new meaning. Visions of pilots using their “chocks” to keep their planes from rolling off the airstrip had us in stitches. We all decided that P. was definite “chock of the walk” material on that particular day.
My sides still ache.
