I love James. I love him dearly. He has many sterling qualities. He is a truly kind person, which I am not. As I said to my friend Carlota this afternoon “If James had dinner with Hitler, he’d say “Yeah…I dunno…that guy was a little…intense.” (I mention this only because we sat at a green light for several minutes while she laughed, because it is such a very accurate description. There is no malice in James at all.)

However, James has a somewhat…eclectic vocabulary. He’s very intelligent, but homonyms tend to defeat him. And things that aren’t even homonyms. He is a rampant committer of malapropisms. The difference between “stigma” and “stigmata” has never quite taken, for example, with occasionally unsettling results.

Yesterday he paused behind my chair and said, in the gruff squeak he’s had since the flu, “Man…I feel a lot better, I’m totally over the flu, but this lycanthropy is still bothering me.”

I digested this for a moment. Lycanthropy. Really. Man. You think I’d notice a thing like that. Admittedly, I’m not the most observant woman in the world, but still… “Your WHAT?”

“My voice. You know, I’m all hoarse…”

“Laryngitis?”

“Yeah! What did I say?”

I was tempted to lay in wolfsbane and silver cough drops, but somehow that probably wouldn’t help.