Thursday, June 12, 2014

How’s that again?

When both Elephant’s Child and Hilltophomesteader said in their comments on the previous post that they had never heard of raising an Ebenezer, I thought about a recent experience of mine.

The other day I went into Belk’s Department Store in Canton, and while I was standing at the cash register making a payment on my account, I saw in the middle distance a rack of what looked like seersucker suits in the men’s department.

I asked the sales clerk, who was not a child by any means but a woman of perhaps 45 years, “Are those seersucker suits over there?”

“What?” she said.

“Are those seersucker suits over there?” I repeated.

“What?” she said again, with the same blank look on her face as before.

A light bulb went on in my head. She had no idea what I was talking about. “Do you not understand the word ‘seersucker’?” I asked.

“No,” she said.

“You’ve never heard of seersucker?” I asked, not believing my ears.

“Never,” said the sales clerk.

“It’s a type of lightweight, puckered cloth used to make clothing that people wear in warm weather,” I said. “I must be really old. I didn’t realize the word had passed out of use.”

So it is with great joy that I can now announce that the word ‘seersucker’ has not passed out of use. I present with pleasure an article I found online today, “National Seersucker Day Comes Back to Congress, Thank God”.

If you don’t want to do the due diligence, I will summarize. Our illustrious U.S. Congress stopped bickering over their usual differences long enough to agree on something truly important. They formally re-instated National Seersucker Day, which had been a bipartisan Capitol Hill tradition between 1996 and 2012 that somehow was abandoned in 2013. This summer, therefore, between Memorial Day and Labor Day, members of the U.S. House of Representatives will wear seersucker on Wednesdays, and members of the U.S. Senate will wear seersucker on Thursdays.


God’s in His heaven; all’s right with the world.

Or not.

That has yet to be determined. I think the bill is still in committee.

But at least I am not an old codger whose vocabulary, not to mention style, is passé.

I am as au courant as the headlines in your daily newspaper.

It is that lady sales clerk who needs to get a grip. I don’t know how she ever got a job in the clothing department.

Maybe she should raise an Ebenezer.

5 comments:

  1. Next thing they'll be bringing back safari suits !

    ReplyDelete
  2. Seersucker I knew about - though I haven't seen it in a looooong time. And am not sorry.
    And I miss the days when shop assistants were required to know their products. Badly miss those days.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Ick. Seersucker should stay in the past. Many other things that are more important may remain...such as good manners, polite speech, knowledge of normal, everyday occurrences such as family dinner at the table. Actually, I changed my mind. There are many MANY people in Walmart that would greatly benefit from a few layers of seersucker. And remember....tights are NOT pants.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Good to see that your leaders have their minds on important things. It's frightening.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Gang of Four, a thousand pardons. Somehow I missed replying to your excellent comments on this two-week-old post. Apparently my "reply to comments" gene was apparently turned off, or at least gone on vacation. I grovel at your feet.

    ReplyDelete

<b>Always true to you, darlin’, in my fashion</b>

We are bombarded daily by abbreviations in everyday life, abbreviations that are never explained, only assumed to be understood by everyone...