Hello, all!
Welcome to the premier post on Wright Writes Rites Right, the paramount phonological palindrome (Is that even a thing? Guess we'll find out in a post soon!) with all words also being homophones that form a complete sentence (I may have made that last part up--except for the complete sentence section. It's definitely a complete sentece.)
and a blog on good grammar
and eclectica—what that means exactly, well, you’ll have to wait and see. Rather than go all out on speed-dating-style
introductions where I throw my two-minute college-career-future-family spiel on
to try to snake charm that phone number out of you, let’s get down to the nitty
gritty, what you really want to know:
Is
Rachael Ray coming to eat you?
If you're like me, when you see this image, immediately after appreciating a
lovely literary pun, you grab the phone and dial up the nearest investigative
body to delve into Rachael Ray’s apparent newfound depravity.
Whodathunk the lovely Ray hid a cannibal-dog-eater
behind her pure-as-EVOO smile?
Why,
Rachael, why?
Did culinary ennui lead
you to more exotic meats?
No.
No.
No, Rachael.
That’s just
wrong.
When you introduced your husband
to your mother and she said she’d love to eat him up, she wasn’t being serious!
What’s that?
A misplaced comma?
Rachael really finds inspiration in cooking,
her family and her dog?
As in she’s not
holding that pooch to gauge his tenderness?
That makes sense.
But the web was already ablaze with the darkly comic image, people chastising
Rachael for her poor taste in cuisine—it may cost less than $40 to buy and less
than 30 minutes to bake—but that doesn’t make cooking Isaboo right!—or ridiculing
Tails magazine for its apparent lack of proofreading skills.
But it’s not that simple.
As with
countless other shock photos on the internet, Rachael’s “I-love-cooking-my-family-and-Fido”
image was the result of Photoshop gone amok.
And according to Tails founder Janice Brown, like some of the funniest
things on the internet (me opining, not her—but seriously, have you seen the
Charlie Brown trailer?), the doctored cover began circulating on Funny Or Die
almost two years ago.
Roughly a year later,
Tails made a public acknowledgement of the editing after receiving flack, and
the issue simmered down until the photo went viral again.
That’s the thing with viruses; just when you
think you’ve got things under control, there they go again, breaking out and
ruining junior prom with Meredith James, who would have kissed you but eww…
The cover is funny regardless of its illegitimate origin.
It made me laugh, which is good—even if it
was one of those oh-my-gosh-I-hope-Rachael-isn’t-coming-for-me-what-was-that-noise-outside-the-window
laughs.
Laughter burns calories
(especially when tied to a fight-or-flight adrenaline rush as you run from a
cleaver-wielding Rachael), and I had a rather large dinner tonight that I’d
prefer not to see on the scale tomorrow morning.
And no.
I did not find this latest recipe in a Rachael Ray cookbook, though it
did call for two cups of Soylent Green.
Is it just me, or do you still find the corrected cover disconcerting, just
not for the same reasons as before?
Would it have been too hard for Tails to establish parallelism by
writing “her cooking, her family and her dog”?
Might have saved them a bit of trouble when debunking the clever online
memer behind man- and dog-eater Rachael because “finds inspiration in her
cooking her family and her dog” flows less well without the comma than the
current viral sensation.
But let’s be
honest.
The scariest thing about seeing the
real cover is realizing the mischievous Photoshopper removed a perfectly good Oxford comma.
That’s downright terrifying.
Folks, the commas are free, they're everywhere, and you don't even have to go to the student health clinic to pick them up. Don't become another statistic.
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