Take Back the Words!

I was just checking the final copyedits of my book which is appearing in the spring, which includes a scene where zookeepers are chasing a raccoon around a Dumpster. That's right, Dumpster, capitalized, because it turns out, this word is a trademark.

Well, three pages of a novel that include the word Dumpster, capitalized, multiple times, reads like advertising copy for the Dumpster Corporation, so I wanted to replace it. But there is no synonym. I got suggestions from many people. They were either circumlocutions that couldn't replace one word repeatedly, or technical descriptions that no one would recognize, or words for a thing that was similar to a Dumpster but not identical.

I also discovered that many words that we all feel are normal English words are also still trademarked, like Laundromat and Bubble Wrap. Bubble Wrap!!!

Well, I've had enough. I want to start a Movement. Why are corporations allowed to interfere with the natural evolution of language? The way it works now, you can get in trouble if you use a trademark generically - but why does a corporation get to decide how we can use the language? If everyone else, as English speakers, needs the word, why does a corporation get to keep it?

Poppers of bubble wrap in dumpsters out behind laundromats, unite! You have nothing to lose but your superfluous capital letters!

Mysteries of the paranormal

A couple of nights ago I had this type of bad dream I often have, where I am living in a group house, and have no privacy, and the bathrooms are weird and I have to wait a long time to use them so I end up being late.

But this one was unusual in that it seemed to take place in the group house I actually lived in when I was in college in Boston, which has never happened before. (Although, there was nothing particularly weird about the bathrooms there in real life.)

Today, I got an email out of the blue from the woman who owns that house, because they are having a 30th birthday celebration for it. Of course I haven't heard from her in years but she found me via Google.

Fairly regularly, I have dreams that turn out to be premonitions, but they're always about useless, trivial things. Like this one, or the very first one when I was a kid, which was about an ice cream place going out of business. They're never about the sort of things you'd like to know in advance, like a winning lottery number.

I feel I have to conclude that there really is such a thing as psychic powers. But that, unfortunately, they aren't really good for anything.

Psychic powers

You know how when you're in a rush, every light seems to turn red as you approach?

I also have the opposite problem if I am driving and have an idea that I need to write down. Today I was having a normal commute till I suddenly figured out how to restructure this week's column. The minute I had the thought, every single light was green. Finally when I was almost at work I managed to check my mirror and stop safely at a yellow before I forgot what I needed to write down.

I don't know how they do it, but obviously the traffic signals can read my mind.