Friday, January 26, 2018

Boweled Over


Not long ago, I was tooling (sorry, that's a terrible pun) around my local Home Depot looking for a drain snake when I saw the following sign:

Now, I don’t know about you, but if I were to make a list of medical services I didn’t want my toilet to perform, elongating my bowel would be right up there with emergency tonsillectomy and open-fracture reduction.

Because I tend to over-think these kinds of things, I got to wondering what could possibly explain the error. A hand-written mistake can't be shrugged off in the same manner as a typo. Was it possible the sign-maker didn’t know how to spell bowl? I certainly hope not and prefer to explain the extra "e" as the oversight of an anatomy student who was up late the night before studying for a test about the gastrointestinal tract.

The lesson, writer friends, is to never underestimate the power of a single letter. But I bet you knew that already.