Don’t
Snort your Orts!
When I
was a wee lass (a better lead-in than “When I was a kid …?”) we were told to “finish
every scrap of food” on our plates, because there were “starving children in
China.”
Well,
we now know the folly of those admonitions. First, we didn’t understand the
correlation between our food and the children in China – our good fortune was
lost in the worry of not getting any pie; and sadly, there always have been and
likely always will be starving children, on every continent.
Second,
finishing everything on our plates often led to obesity – if not then, the gobbling
habit wreaked havoc on our adult years* before we realized we needed smaller plates!
On a lighter
note, can you imagine the food snorting out our noses if our parents had
exclaimed, “Young lady, you finish all the orts
on your plate, or no dessert!”
ORT(s) – n. a scrap or fragment of food left from a meal, usu. used in
plural. [WW#48]
“Usually
used in plural?” When have you usually
used that word in anything? Methinks there are thousands of words in the
dictionary that could easily be eliminated. Why saddle one meaning with three,
four, five or more words to cover it? Think about it, writers …
