The Princess on the Pea's pricking past

Once upon a time, a long, long time ago, there was (1) a prince who wanted (1) a real princess for his wife. He had been searching (3) long and far but no girl had been (4) quite the right one. To find out whether his last candidate was (1) a real princess, she had (1) to sleep on twenty feather beds piled on top of twenty mattresses. He knew (1) that she was the perfect princess when she was telling him (2) that she barely had closed (4) her eyes the whole night. He saw (1) at once that she must become his wife since she had felt (4) a single pea through such a heap of mattresses and feather beds.

The forty layers of mattresses and feather beds are like the layers of our past experiences, and some of those past experiences can prick us even though they happened very, very long ago. As every mattress or feather bed has a different color or texture, past experiences or actions are expressed in different forms to clearly indicate what happened when in relation to other experiences or activities.

1) Simple past (realized) for activities/situations that began and ended in the past
2) Past Progressive (was listening) for activities that occured at the same moment as another action but began earlier and were in progress when the other (realized) occured.
3) Past Perfect Progressive (had been searching) to show the duration of an activity that was in progress before another activity in the past (realized)occured.
4) Past Perfect (had met) for an activity that was completed before another activity in the past (realized) occured.

From a long, long time ago to January 31, 2010. The incorrect past tenses of the original are corrected:

Andrea Elliott tells the story of Omar Hammamia, a "popular kid from a small town in Alabama," who became Abu Mansoor Al-Amriki, an Al Qaeda sympathizer. She tells us that Hammami once called his wife to tell her "that he had traveled to Somalia because he wanted to meet her relatives. Indeed he was staying with Sadiyo's [his wife's] grandmother in Mogadishu...In other phone calls, he told Sadiyo and his parents that he was stranded because someone had stolen his passport...He started reaching out to [his sister] after his wife in Toronto had asked for a divorce... In October 2007 - less than a year after Hammami had landed in Somalia - he made his public debut as Abu Mansoor Al-Amriki...His high school girlfriend caught a glimpse of the video on the news ... He seemed like a shell of the guy who had taken her to homecoming, a boutonniere pinned to his lapel."

Imagery run amok

Imagery, language that suggests visual pictures or denotes sensory experiences, can help to give a more vivid, clearer description of abstract ideas because the reader can see or hear, even believe to taste, touch or smell an object, character or setting. Tastes and smells are especially difficult to convey in words, yet the writer should close her eyes and imagine what she is trying to describe, otherwise imagery rather than being as intricate and as glittering as a necklace for Cleopatra turns into a thorn in the reader’s side and an albatross around his neck. The following goulash of phrases was served by several food magazines. Any similarity to articles printed is not coincidental.

In our crisp and curated¹ kitchen with digital drawers² to die for³, we were setting the dinner table with new flatware: a five minute wow⁴. We wanted to reminisce about our cruise that had promised us to captivate not only our palates but our eyes as well, to dine in a manner not easily forgotten, to release our inner sous-chef⁵, and to indulge in the notion⁶ to have breakfast appear daily on our private verandah.
Now we were ready for the miraculous endeavor to expand our palate beyond the usual go-to poultry⁷ and made a chicken salad according to a recipe thoroughly tested by the editors of a cooking magazine. They had reviewed hundreds of recipes, then prepared and tasted a large number of finalists with a panel of judges⁸. When I read the winner, my taste buds were so entranced⁹ by the description that I had to give it a try.
This chicken salad had traveled the world¹⁰, absorbing local flavors with amazing versatility. It had seen Mexico, where chicken sits atop a crisp tortilla, composing a tostada¹¹. It has met the Swiss who added a fennel bonus, bright and brash with worldly flavor. It even had been to Asia, where turmeric gives an earthy intensity and golden sheen to normally passive chicken, turmeric being one of those spices that show how in today’s cyberspace-paced world, ingredients evolve from gourmet to everyday¹² practically overnight. We tasted the salad, and our opinions rode a roller coaster of individual tastes. Somebody, however, dared to insist that it activated every gag reflex in the room¹³.

To take our dinner to glorious new heights, we had made cup cakes for dessert. Although plain looking, they pack a ton of flavor¹⁴. A triple dose of ginger adds a vibrancy that other spice cakes can only dream of. It gives these babies a kick¹⁵, and the caramel sauce infuses them with a depth of nutty flavor. The icing on the cake: these cup cakes freeze like a dream¹⁶.


If all this doesn’t make you want to tie on an apron and grease you own pans and pots, then try Babette’s Feast


1) Nothing against a well-organized kitchen, but the kitchen as a museum?
2) Drawers converted to binary numeric form? Useless for real-world kitchen gadgets.
3) Like “loving” an MD burger, this is just too much passion wasted on nothing.
4) Whatever this means.
5) Since a sous chef is directly in charge of day to day production in the kitchen, one can obviously pay for this cruise by barter.
6) I would hope to indulge in having breakfast appear on my verandah rather than in just the notion of it.
7) On which team is this go-to chicken playing?
8) This is cannibalism.
9) What a full mouth with a captivated and expanded palate and entranced taste buds.
10) It’s probably not a good idea to eat this salad anymore after such a journey.
11) Must be the latest ruse to pass as a Foster Farms Chicken.
12) Neither rhyme nor reason here.
13) Well, is it the window or the wall which is going to throw up?
14) 2,000 lbs of flavor in a cup cake is like a storm in a teacup.
15) May be sued for child abuse.
16) Should consult Sigmund Freud about that.

Me First!

"For words, like Nature, half reveal
And half conceal the Soul within"
(Alfred Lord Tennyson).



A new field of psychology, called ecopsychology, addresses anxiety and other mental maladies that are directly related to the rather common loss of our innate ecological instincts and consequently to our dysfunctional relationship with nature. Because humans for so long have believed in the dualism of mind and body, which presumably allows us to destroy nature without harming our mind, we live according to the premise "what interests me is me" and proportionally have disconnected ourselves from others and the world around us.

“You decide that you want to get rid of the byproducts of human life and that Lake Erie will be a good place to put them. You forget that the ecomental system called Lake Erie is a part of your wider ecomental system — and that if Lake Erie is driven insane, its insanity is incorporated in the larger system of your thought and experience.” Our inability to see this truth, Bateson maintained, was becoming monstrously apparent. Human consciousness evolved to privilege “purposiveness” — to get us what we want, whether what we want is a steak dinner or sex. Expand that tendency on a mass scale, and it is inevitable that you’re going to see some disturbing effects: red tides, vanishing forests, smog, global warming. “There is an ecology of bad ideas, just as there is an ecology of weeds,” Bateson wrote, “and it is characteristic of the system that basic error propagates itself.”

This basic error indeed propagates itself and grows like weed in our daily lives and in our language. As Jean Twenge in her book Generation Me points out, books and TV shows that revolve around the self have been blanketing the nation for many years. As a consequence, self-reference words (I, me, mine, myself) have proliferated, however at the cost of collective words (humanity, country, community etc). Twenge quotes Britney Spears saying in 2004 that her priorities are “Myself, my husband, and starting a family.” Not only does none of the three listed items in any way refer to anything outside Spears’ own individual life, she also begins her list with herself before she remembers her partner and her hypothetical future children. Until not too long ago, it was considered very impolite to mention oneself first. It was proper to say that “Michael and I are going out tonight.” Today, it is more likely to hear that “I and Michael are going out.” As Twenge reminds us, such manifestation of a change in mores should not come as a surprise after years of schools concentrating on students’ self-esteem and their self-esteem only. After all, there is no need to improve when one has “worthy and good inner essence… [that deserves] recognition and attention from others;” and there is no need to heed others when the “individual needs should be considered first and foremost” (65).
"A single word often betrays a great design," Jean Baptiste Racine believed. Thus, language is nothing more and nothing less than an expression of the way we think. Putting ourselves first and ignoring our ecological and social instincts ad perpetuum will destroy the planet because it will have destroyed our mind. Many already may feel solastalgia, a pain over the realization that what we call home (and this includes environment and language) is seriously endangered. Will we understand that without changing our attitude towards the outside (and the way we express this attitude) we will not feel much better inside?