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The Slice: Just call them Grandpa McCoy and the Young Democrats
You can have nicknames for your neighbors, even if you really like them. It doesn’t have to be even slightly disparaging.
So have you ever tried to imagine how the couple next door or the people across the street refer to you in private?
I’m sure their secret nickname for you is meant fondly.
Let’s move on.
Slice answers: “Most uninformed generalization?” wrote Jennifer Bell-Towne. “That all people who move here from California are rich.”
Vince Roland suggested a product that could be test-marketed in Spokane might be “Turn signals that work by extra sensory perception.”
And Victor Buksbazen, who learned from his father when he was 6, estimated he has taught 100 people to play chess. “Some of them probably play better than I do by now.”
Just wondering: Do you use your pets as an alarm clock? How reliable are they? Did last weekend’s time change throw them off?
Suggest a name for the new state: Molly Arnzen has been looking at some letters her father, Maynard Arnzen, wrote home to his parents on the Camas Prairie in Idaho while he was in the military during the Korean War. This is an excerpt from a letter sent in March of 1951.
“As far as making a new state out of North Idaho, Western Montana and Eastern Washington, that should’ve been done a long time ago.”
Roots: “I moved here in November 2015, after 30 years in Seattle,” wrote Judy Kotar. Before Seattle I lived in Duluth, Minnesota, for 14 years. People in Duluth told me ‘If you weren’t born here, you will never be from here.’ ”
She wonders if the same might be true in Spokane.
Anyone care to advise her?
Annie Sanders’ favorite boat name: “We spent six years living on a sailboat, but our favorite name was not a sailboat, but a motor craft with a giant arrow (like you see on shipping cartons) painted on the stern pointing toward the sky and the boat’s name was ‘This Side Up.’ ”
Warm-up question: What does it mean when an adult in your family responds to a request with “Let me think about it”?
Today’s Slice question: Do you and your spouse or significant other have secret across-the-room signals for use at social gatherings?
Write The Slice at P. O. Box 2160, Spokane, WA 99210; call (509) 459-5470; email pault@spokesman.com. If you are a baby boomer, it could be that your entire repertoire of sounds, sayings and gestures borrowed from Curly of the Three Stooges is wasted on certain much-younger workplace colleagues.