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For Want Of A Hyphen…

By Eulalia Benejam Cobb

While the snow piled up outside today, I thought it would be a good time to replace the ties on my (home-made) duvet cover with the snaps I bought in Rutland last week.

Rutland is the second-largest city in Vermont, and the ugliest.  It even has a  strip on which are stores like Bed, Bath etc., Joanne\’s Fabrics, a mall with K-mart and Sears.  When we need stuff beyond raw cow\’s milk or layer pellets, we sigh and go to Rutland.

That is where I bought a little snap-inserting gizmo, which came with enough snaps, I thought, for my purposes.

As the blizzard raged outside, I wrestled the king-size duvet (we have a queen-size bed, but I believe in over-duvetting) out of its cover, and set about unstitching the nine pairs of ties and replacing them with snaps.  The snap-inserting gizmo came with a fairly complex set of directions involving pencil erasers and hammers, but after some false starts I figured out what to do.

No sooner had I inserted the first set of snaps, however, than I realized I didn\’t have enough–I needed nine sets, and only had four.  How was this possible?  I remembered clearly checking the package label and ensuring that the gizmo came with  more than enough snaps for my purposes.

I pulled the label out of the trash, and here is what it said:  4 size 16 snaps.

Obviously, in the store my eyes had focused on \”16 snaps,\” and that is what I assumed was in the package.  Had the benighted souls who write such things possessed the rudiments of grammar (I know I\’m sounding priggish, but too bad), the label would have read 4 size-16 snaps, and I would have bought an additional five size-16 snaps.

As it is, we are going to have to make an extra 45-minute trip to Rutland, past the lake with the ice-fishing shacks, past the snow-covered cow-farms and the country stores selling local goat cheese and expensive wines, to the awful strip to buy five snaps.

But all is not lost.  We can have lunch at Kentucky Fried Chicken.

8 Responses

  1. Hmm? Is that a poke to see if any of us are awake out here in cyberland? Kentucky Fried Chicken? Really? Do tell. What am I missing?

  2. Hey, Indigo — I agree: Original Recipe is indeed the best! (And I like their coleslaw better than anyone else's, too.)

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