I had a brief thought about trying trying to ask for one at the counter:
"I need a great sparkled fraternity. I mean, a freight spanked fickle lilly. No, wait, a crate mangled fritterfrilly. No? A great teutonic titterwilly? Trait-specific hereditary? Um... fate frazzled hillbilly? Razzle-dazzled pickled lorrie?
"Fuck it. I need a 70-cent stamp."
Ah, how I love word salad for breakfast. I'm thinking of butterfly shaped fritters, for some reason.
ReplyDeleteThe employees at my local post office keep an informal list of names their customers use when asking for the "forever" stamps--"eternal," "endless," "immortal," etc. They must have started another list for the fritillaries by now.
ReplyDelete--Queen Anne's Lace
Laughed till I cried
ReplyDeleteRepeat After Me: I will have one of those.
ReplyDeleteAnd do not mention anything about , well you know to the clerk.
And I thought fritillary was only a type of flower... Learned something new today, Dr Grumpy. You are one awesome yak herder!
ReplyDeleteAll I can think of is "Holy shit, stamps are $.70 now"?!?
ReplyDeleteYou think that's bad? Try asking a tattoo artist to put one on your lower back when it's late at night and you've had 10 or 12 Bacardi Breezers.
ReplyDeleteThis, in a very small way, gives us a hint of how people feel when they talk to someone in the medical field. Just think about how you have heard people pronounce some of the words we use....It can be fun sometimes to figure out exactly what patients are trying to tell us.
ReplyDeleteI was under the impression that a fritillary was a flower, too. But, it turns out, Fritillaria is a genus name, too, for the fritillaries (of which, some are not so nicely fragrant) and the 'fritillary' refer to 'dice-box' which I am not so sure looks like since the dice we used as children came in Milton-Bradley cardboard. But, we all know what spangled means, and just by looking at the stamp drawing, one might be hard-put to figure out where it fits in.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, there are a great many butterflies, and so one might not find it easy to come up with a name that automatically places its form in the imagination. On the other hand, I'm not one to easily conjure butterflies unless someone mentions names like 'black swallowtail', 'monarch', and 'sulphur'. And, I do know that Steve McQueen was an actor in Le (or La?) Papillon. But, how did you know that Cocteau Twins big 1983 hit was 'Great Spangled Fritillary'?
[Wikipedia]
Spangled fritillary sounds like a phrase my great grandfather would have used to describe a fancy dress.
ReplyDelete"Dang nabbit, you spent $5 on that spangled fritillary!?"
Dear Diary,
ReplyDeleteToday at work, some guy came up to my counter and asked me if I'd give him a "great spangled fritillary." I had the security guys take him out back and beat him up. Amazing the kind of creeps that are out there.
Philately (/fɪˈlætəliː/ fi-la-tə-lee) is the study of stamps and postal history and other related items.
ReplyDeleteCoincidence? I think not!
Social butterflies and spangled fritillaries? Sounds like one of those old-fashioned descriptions at Women's Wear Daily.
ReplyDeleteI'm not having the greatest of days, so to distract me from sad stuff, I actually started reading back on your blog to see what I missed. I'm so glad that I did, this had my eyes watering from laughing so hard. Thanks.
ReplyDelete