Pumpkins on Pronunciation

I know, I know: I haven't written in something like three weeks. I am a despicable human being and an even more despicable blogger. Can I blame circumstance?

The truth is, I’ve been pouring myself into the world of copy editing; I lie in bed at night, plagued by thoughts of miscreant punctuation and wayward capitalization. “Should that comma have gone inside the quotation marks, or outside?” I think to myself, brow furrowed as sweat gathers on my upper lip. Then the guilt sets in, and sleep eludes me. “I ought to get up and change it now,” I think, and after three or four similar dilemmas accumulate—semicolon or dash? hyphen or no?— I abandon all attempts at not-quite-sleep-but-sure-as-hell-trying and get up to make the necessary adjustments. Where’s time for blogging in all of this?

However, there are rare occasions on which I venture beyond my intimate relationship with the Chicago Manual of Style and go do real, people-ish things with real, people-ish people. On Halloween, for example, I specifically carved out time for two hollow gourds: a peculiarly shaped pumpkin, and a boy named Dora.

The pumpkin needs no explanation, though I’ll give it anyway. When my siblings and I got out of the car at the roadside field, I was overwhelmed by the profusion of flawless pumpkins, all perfectly plump and orange, like a ghostly field of silicone replicas of what someone somewhere envisioned the “perfect pumpkin” to look like. It was The Stepford Wives in a pumpkin patch. And it was a sickening sight, reminiscent of emails from girls who end every sentence with an exclamation mark! And dot their i’s with little hearts! And think round and peppy pumpkins are positively precious!

Then I saw a different kind of pumpkin altogether, a pumpkin that bowed its puckered head in shame, an obvious outcast among the picture perfect. I promptly made my purchase. I had what I had come for: a one-of-a-kind, hopelessly imperfect, fabulously charming pumpkin with one unforgivable flaw: it looked like a butt.



The truth of the matter was, with its deep center cleave and two nicely rounded cheeks, the pumpkin looked so much like a butt that there was little else it could be; it practically was a butt. My brother was worried. “Are you going to carve that side?” he asked, pointing to the butt side, consternation apparent on his freckled face.

“Yeah,” I said. “Why?”

“It’s just… I wanted to have all the pumpkins face the street. And that one, well…” He looked embarrassed.

“Looks like a butt?” I said. He giggled nervously. “I know it does,” I said with a reassuring smile. “That’s why I bought it.”

And it’s true. I’ve never before felt such a strong connection between myself and an inanimate object with junk in the trunk.

The boy named Dora was a different story. I stumbled upon him at a Halloween party where, by the time of my arrival, most people were already pretty sloshed. Of course, no one can compete with a certain Z.C. who holds the current record for slosh’daptitude, supported primarily by his stunning debut of alcohol-induced vomiting—publicly, and yet with such grace and preservation—during a recent binge fest. Disappointingly, when I arrived at the Halloween party, nobody had a trash can clasped between their fine manly legs; no one was even throwing up. But a mix of excessive alcohol consumption and the inferior public education system in Texas ensured that my costume—a Freudian slip—remained an enigma to most casual onlookers.

Now, to be fair, I stole my costume idea from a certain S.S. (not the ship) who, she later admitted, stole the idea herself. Do two wrongs make a right? Perhaps. I never took moral philosophy. Regardless, I arrived at the party clad in a silken black slip with a picture of Sigmund Freud looped delicately around my neck. Most people looked confused.

Dora was one of those. He was dressed in a tight-fitting pink shirt with “I DORA” in thick black letters on the front. To complete the look, he was sporting a short black wig and a purple polka-dotted backpack, replete with a half-full bottle of 1792. Dora was ready to explore. He’d obviously been doing quite a bit of exploring already.

Confronted by my curious combination of a computerized image and lingerie, Dora was immediately perplexed. Still, he was eager, and obviously willing to try. So I worked with him a bit, and together we culled the clues. Our conversation went something like this: What am I wearing? “A shirt!” No; try again. Starts with an s… “Silk!” Yes, good, that’s what it’s made of. Now what is it? … (long pause) … “A slip?!” Bravo. You’re halfway there. Now who’s this? (pointing to Freud)

Here he was stumped. “It’s on the tip of my tongue,” he assured me in his thick Texan twang, a twang so thick I thought it was some kind of costume-inspired accent for a good five minutes before I realized it was actually his own. “I know this guy!” he said. “I study psychology!” But he couldn’t quite spit it out.

After a few minutes, the name still wasn’t coming. And yet, determined to demonstrate that he did, in fact, know the man whose image sat comfortably on my chest, Dora began to throw out some keywords to prove his point. “I know this guy,” he repeated. “He talks about the ego. The ego and the i.D.,” he said excitedly, gathering steam. “That’s right, the i.D.!”

Now, I am well aware that the particular psychological construct of which Dora spoke isn’t the i.D. at all, but rather, the id (rhymes with “rid” and “lid” and “PDidd”[y]). I spell it as such to emphasize the way in which it was pronounced. Every time Dora uttered the word, it came out “i.D.,” as if you might tuck the id into your wallet and pull it out when buying booze at 7-Eleven. A couple of beers? A little pleasure? Sex with your mother? Yes, please. Your total comes to $3.99. Have a nice day!

Thanks to Dora’s southern twang, the word was transformed into a further bastardization of the original, resulting in a mix of vowels and consonants that might garner a rough phonetic representation of “ah-‘deeee.” Over and over again, Dora attempted to impress upon me the fact that he did know that guy hanging around my neck, and even if he couldn’t recall his name, gosh darnit, the man clearly had something to do with the ah deeee.

At several points, my friend Meghan quietly and gently interjected the comment, “Um, I think it’s the ‘id’”…all to no avail. Dora persisted in talking about the ah deeee. The ah deeee this, the ah deeee that. I half expected him to pronounce “ego” like the waffle, with the obligatory “leggo my” tacked on the front. Thankfully, we never got that far.

Maybe I’m too selective about the company I keep. But when given the choice, I think I prefer my butt pumpkin. Hey, at least I took an honest stab at holiday social interaction. As for a repeat occurrence? I’m not gonna go and get any big ah deeees.