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If you say potatoe, let’s call the whole thing off
By Devon Wiesend
I recently had a horrific experience in the Union. Walking past the Terrace Café, I thought to myself, “Soup sounds good.”
As I read the board listing the specials and soups for that day, I froze. Then I started having flashbacks to the first President Bush, when it was the vice president who was the literary ignoramus. There it was, in neon marker: “Soups: Vegetable & Potatoe Chowder”
Potatoe? Since when does potato have an “e?” I remember back to my childhood, when Dan Quayle, the laughable, powerless vice president spelled potato wrong.
Laughter rang through the countryside and people were joking about how the dictionary would have to be rewritten if anything ever happened to our commander-in-chief and the village idiot took over.
“Saturday Night Live” did at least one skit. My grade school teacher made a joke when she asked one of my classmates how to spell potato, and he got it right. The joke pertained to Quayle’s level of education being lower than her grade-school students.
Children were laughing at him; high school graduates were embarrassed that Quayle was representing our country. It was awful. How did he spell potato? “P-O-T-A-T-O-E.”
This brings me to the reason I was petrified when I saw the misspelled sign in the Union. I said something to the person at the cash register. He shrugged it off. I figured at some point someone would notice and change it or the cashier would go out with a wet rag and change it himself.
I even asked who wrote the sign, inquiring if Dan Quayle had taken a bad cut in the stock market and was working the Terrace kitchen to make ends meet. Everyone replied blandly to my horror.
When I passed by again three hours later, the sign hadn’t been fixed. I again went into the Terrace and said something to the cashier, a different one. I insisted it needed to be changed, again asking who wrote the sign.
Her reply was, “Someone who works here.” I wanted to hear that it was someone who was a volunteer, suffering from a bad case of dyslexia. Another part of me insisted to myself that it was a joke, it must be, no one would allow that sign to be up all day without fixing it, unless it was on purpose.
OK, where is he? Am I on candid camera? No such luck. The cashier gave me a weird look that appeared to express her opinion of my insistence on a spell check of a menu sign. Sure, I’m the crazy one.
On my way out the door again, dejected and sad, I said aloud, “It’s a college for pete’s sake, doesn’t anyone get it?”
No. No one does. No one seems to understand how painful it was for me to hear someone today say, “He do,” when meaning, “He does.” No one gets the fact that I hate when the lobby of our Union looks like a flea market.
No one understands how nauseating it was to not only see this sign and its ominous spelling of potato, but that no one cared, or was embarrassed, or changed it or even noticed.
The part that makes me sick is that these signs are representative of our college and the education it’s providing. This incident makes me want to transfer to Quayle’s alma mater — at least they felt embarrassed.
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