26 May Fight a Liar
As a supplement to their at-home academic learning, the girls have been working on their cooking skills. They often make their own snacks and lunches during their breaks from online school.
Yesterday, Ella decided to make some oatmeal for lunch. If you have made slow-cooking oatmeal on the stove before, you likely know there is a point in the cooking process when the oatmeal mixture begins to bubble up. Left unattended, for reasons I’m sure chemists can explain, it tends to erupt out of the pan like a spewing volcano. Unless you are quick to stir it or remove it from the heat, the mixture oozes over the sides, leaving puddles of milky oatmeal all over the stove. It’s a mess. Usually when it happens to me, I vow to never make oatmeal again.
On this day, I happened to walk into the kitchen right as an oatmeal eruption was taking place. Ella, waiting for the 10-minute cooking time listed on the container, was relaxing on the couch and reading a book.
“Ella!” I exclaimed. “You have to watch this carefully while it is cooking!”
Ella raced over to where I was standing near the stove. I turned off the flame, took the pan off the burner and we both stared down at the mess. “It’s important to be careful when cooking. This stuff that went all over is covering the gas flame. It could fight a liar!” I said, transposing the beginning sounds of “light a fire.”
Ella looked up, processing what I had said, and burst out laughing. Realizing my mistake, I started laughing too. It became the contagious kind of laughter where you can barely breathe, laughing harder and harder at the ridiculousness of what I had said.
Ella and I have been delighted by the discovery of Spoonerisms – the official name of these verbal mistakes, when the first sounds or letters are mixed up. They are named after Reverend William Archibald Spooner, a professor who was a notorious transposer of words and syllables.
We spent the next half hour thinking of funny-sounding Spoonerisms, laughing harder and harder at each one. By the time we got around to cleaning up the oatmeal mess, the gloopy milk and oatmeal mixture had hardened and peeled up easily in one big piece from the stove, like a sheet of plastic.
Either way, the mess had to be cleaned up. But it turned out that laughing first and cleaning up second saved clean-up time and created a nice shared moment in our day.
Some Thursday thood for fought…