Category Archives: Snack Sack

Cacti vs Cactuses

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Awaiting my turn in the dentist’s chair, I started thumbing an old copy of ‘Arizona Highways.’

It was either that or ‘Dentistry Today’, and I figured that before an hour was up I’d know more than I necessarily want to about the dental arts in general and my personal oral apparatus in particular. And anyway, ‘Arizona Highways’ is a fine publication full of pretty words and informative pictures and colorful advertorials plugging everything from authentic Southwestern art I can’t afford to posh Sonoran resorts I can’t afford. I had just finished drinking in the delicious details of a sumptuous Lake Havasu dinner cruise I can’t afford a when my eye lit upon this irresistible header:

“Cacti or Cactuses – readers find the proper plural a thorny question.”

As your luck would have it, that’s something I know something about. Stickery succulents, I mean, not grammar. Fact is, it’s long been my custom to spend a couple months each winter in Tucson, and it’s been my custom while in Tucson to get acquainted with at least one new hiking trail each week, which practice has made me intimately – and at times painfully – familiar with the Sonoran Desert’s most fearsome flora. And it is by virtue of that hard-won credential that I herewith settle this divisive question for good and always.

They’re both wrong.

With all due respect to the Romans, for whom I harbor a deep and abiding affection, their language isn’t just dead, it’s petrified. And even Latin’s most ardent admirers must admit that the needlessly abrupt “-i” as a plural suffix form for words ending in “-us” is irregularly applied, at best, and is at worst timorous and unreliable.

The accepted plural of octopus, for example, is generally accepted to be octopi, and if an abacus were used to count itself twice it would be abaci. On the other hand, colleges and universities have no compunction about maintaining multiple campuses, and no person of serious mind has ever described a convocation of unfairly demeaned anatomical orifices as a clutch of ani.

Perhaps worse, “cacti” carries the subtle stink of affectation; a 50-cent shine on a 10-cent word that persons of unlikely intellectual ambitions trot out because they think it makes them sound scholarly. As a plural for cactus, the word “cacti” is to be shunned, as are all who use it.

Turning to “cactuses”, please understand that I have nothing against the “-es” plural suffix. It has a long and honorable record of service. It’s comfortable, predictable, versatile. A short and retiring supplement, it wields a potent grammatical authority that complete words of far greater definition and prestige can only dream of. It’s just no good for cactus.

In that case, “-es” takes the starch out of the very word it means to exalt. It sucks all of the smart, staccato vigor out the hard Cs and the T, and sends an otherwise distinctive term sliding down into a hissing swamp of weedy sibilance. Aesthetically, “cactuses” does not well become the mouth. Taxonomically, it’s a grave affront to some of proud Nature’s most durable, and most dangerous, herbaceous creations. It’s a blameless suffixed forced to evil purpose by the ignorant, and people of good conscience will avoid it in both written and spoken discourse.

Having now seen the two widely accepted plural forms of “cactus” utterly and irrevocably discredited, it would be fair to wonder what alternative I propose. Only this:

The only legitimate plural of cactus is…cactus.

How simple, and yet how sublime. And don’t look so shocked. It works for moose, and for fish, and for pants. Why not cactus? Go ahead – try it on for size.

“Thank you for the generous gift of this single potted cactus.”

“Thank you for the generous gift of these two potted cactus.”

“Ouch! I pricked my finger on this solitary barrel cactus.”

“Hello, 911 dispatch? I have fallen face-first into an unspecified number of barrel cactus”

See? There’s no discomfort associated with this flexible usage, nor unpleasant aftertaste. Fact is, I’ve been doubling-down on cactus for years without social stigma or legal complication. And if my inspired expedient occasionally meets with resistance from the ignorant and the puritanical, right-thinking folk invariably thank me effusively, and are grateful to be at last free of the self-doubt and grammatical uncertainty that formerly plagued them in cactus-related situations.

And you’re welcome, too.

Stale New Year’s Thoughts

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Fact is, I’m not much for New Year’s anymore.

I don’t go out, I don’t stay up, and I don’t pay a lot of attention to those tedious “year in review” features that seem to be the principle media fare during Christmas Week. I may be slipping, but I haven’t slipped so far that I can’t remember paying $3.35 for gas without prompting, and being reminded about “Gangnam Style” is no way to kick off a new calendar in any case. But that isn’t to say I don’t practice certain beloved rites of the season. One of my favorites is not making any New Year’s resolutions.

Sure, I used to indulge in that sort of sketchy enterprise, but it wasn’t for me. For one thing, I typically set my bar so low I could never be completely sure whether I was staying the course or not. When your resolution is to “not put things off as much,” any chance act of celerity looks like success, never mind that 6-inch pile of unanswered correspondence. For another, vowing to buy a new laptop in the coming 12 months isn’t exactly a bid for self-improvement, especially when you’ve been pricing them online since October. These days I just don’t have the energy for the charade.

But that’s me.

Beth Foster, on the other hand, has pledged a healthier and more active 2013. “I re-upped my membership at 24-Hour Fitness and plan to stop in for a swim a few times each week after rehearsals and shows.”

Seems to me like a better resolution would have been to cut down on all those rehearsals and shows, but then I’m not a founding member of the small-but-feisty “One Night Stand Productions” theater company, and the only thing I hate worse than doing something once is doing it again. Still, swimming is purportedly aerobic, and since Beth tends towards cleanliness and a couple of laps count as a bath, she might actually realize a net time savings.

I deem Beth’s resolution worthy of support, if not emulation.

Mary Ann Tate forwarded an inspirational post suggesting a way her Facebook friends can spend 2013 creating a personal “Year in Review” featuring more “What I Did Last Summer” and less Taylor Swift. “This January,” urges the post’s author, “why not start the year with an empty jar and fill it with notes about good things that happen? Then, on New Year’s Eve, empty it and see what awesome stuff happened that year.” Mary Ann thinks that’s a great idea.

“What a great idea!!!”, she commented.

Assuming I could find a jar around here that isn’t already full of rubber bands, loose hardware, expired Arby’s coupons, bone-dry pens, or something that may be leftover gravy, I consider this resolution dangerously vague. If my new brake shoes fail catastrophically and the new ones come in under $300, is that a “good thing”? How about when I match three on Lotto? Do I need to write a note if I leave a half-cup of coffee in the pot and somebody else has to brew the next one? Or if a friend catches cold and I don’t get it from them?  No, the remembrance jar is nice in principle, but carries a pronounced risk of over-commemoration.

I would urge caution.

“My new year’s resolution is to not let my daughter on my Facebook, and to find a proper journal for her..:P,” declared Peter Allen.

Notice that Peter’s sensible plan is safely personal. Though I still maintain that too many well-meaning resolutions – “be nicer to people” for example, or “give more to charity” – arrogantly force unconsulted others to be party to one’s private self-improvement scheme, Peter has cleverly charted a course of rehabilitation that reserves credit and distinction to himself while ensuring that any potential sacrifice or inconvenience will be suffered by somebody who lacks effective legal recourse. Perhaps most ingenious, by cleverly adding a playful emoticon at the end of his resolution, Peter can plausibly dismiss it as a harmless jest when grandma gets involved and the whole thing goes south on him.

It’s a thinking man’s resolution.

Happy New Year, Peter’s daughter.

It ain’t EZ

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The taxpayer – that’s someone who works for the federal government but doesn’t have to take the civil service examination.     ~Ronald Reagan

With spring more or less upon us, why so many furrowed brows in the grocery checkout line? With cottonwoods budding out beside every creek and pool, how come the nervous tics and hangdog expressions? Blame it on the season.

Tax season.

Between now and T-Day, those working stiffs who couldn’t or wouldn’t file early will be scrambling for advantage against an agency not known for either empathy or indulgence. Shoe boxes will be produced, illegible receipts sorted, hair pulled and sleep lost. This in spite of the fact that, thanks to a fortunate calendar glitch, taxpayers have two whole extra days to fret and stew before the ax falls at the witching hour on Apr. 17.

tax-manIt could be worse, of course. On average, Coloradans surrender about 10 percent of their daily bread to feed government’s hungry maw, ranking 30th among the various states. New Englanders, by contrast, pay upwards of 12 percent, with Maine and Vermont in a dead heat for dead last at 14 percent and 14.1 percent, respectively.

It could also be much better. In Alaska, which has no state income or sales tax, citizens must share a mere 6.6 percent of their substance with The Man, and every occupant of the Last Frontier gets a fat dividend check each year from the state’s oil-fed permanent fund.

But, whether you pay much or not-quite-as-much, pay you must, and getting square with the Internal Revenue Service has never been more bewildering than it is today. Consider that IRS regulations run to some 8,551,444 words, or more than 11 times the verbiage contained in the King James Bible. Small wonder, then, that, according to IRS statistics, the average taxpayer spends about 13 hours filling out the relatively benign Form 1040. Taken together, that’s about 5.8 billion hours, or roughly 662,000 years of otherwise productive labor.

Still, it’s not as if John and Jane Bloodstone have to navigate those treacherous waters unaided. For starters, the IRS employs well over 100,000 semi-helpful people who manage to answer a whopping 60 percent of the desperate phone calls they receive and dispense accurate information fully 75 percent of the time. Incredibly, some folks are unwilling to stake their financial futures on those odds, which helps explain why people like Evergreen resident Scott Schaus’s wife, Leslie, are among the nation’s most-harried professionals, these days.

IWantMore“She’s a certified public accountant, and right now she’s working 18 hours a day, 7 days a week,” smiles Scott, an electrical contractor. He’s smiling because, no matter how busy Leslie gets, he’ll never have to do his own taxes. That’s definitely something to smile about, but it doesn’t mean Scott remains unscarred by this cruelest of seasons. “When she’s swamped, my job is to run the kids around, do the shopping, cook the meals – pretty much everything else that has to be done – and still try to run my own business. It gets pretty busy, but it’s only for a month or so.”

But Leslie’s good office has its rewards, and not just the financial kind. By way of thanks to the mountain area’s valiant men and women in blue (pinstripe), the Evergreen Players are offering a buy one, get one free deal to all tax preparers. To qualify, they need only flash a business card and a completed Form 199EP with accompanying certified copy of their 2005 Schedule G proof-of-exhaustion affidavit. In triplicate.

Alas, not everyone can be married to a CPA, and that means spending 13 hours, give or take, alone with a calculator, a blizzard of sticky-notes and a throbbing headache. To make matters worse, some unscrupulous cyber-fiends have been exploiting the public distress by masquerading as the IRS and phishing online. According to a presumably legitimate e-mail from the agency’s Denver office, sham e-mails direct punch-drunk taxpayers to sham IRS websites where they’re asked to provide real personal information like social security numbers and bank account passwords.

monopolyGuy“Don’t be fooled by these shameless scam artists,” cautions dashing IRS chief Mark Everson, clearly outraged that a citizen’s honestly provided financial information would be used against them.

Such abuses bug Evergreen resident and information technology business owner Robb Lanier, too. In 1997, after paying his taxes in full and on time, Lanier got a bill from the IRS for $20,000 in late fees.

“I had all kinds of proof that my payment wasn’t late,” Lanier says. “I even had the cancelled check that they cashed before it was even due. I must have made dozens of calls to different people at the IRS, but as a private citizen, they wouldn’t respond to me at all and refused to hear me out. When they started charging interest on it, I finally had to get a lawyer and he was able to get it all straightened out, but I have to wonder how many people can’t afford a lawyer and wind up just paying money they don’t owe because they’re afraid of the IRS.”

Brrr! April can be a chilly season, regardless of the weather.

“My best advice,” Lanier says, “would be pay on time, keep excellent records, and don’t let even the smallest mistake ride. If you don’t stay on top of things, it could cause huge problems later.”

To learn more about today’s people-friendly Internal Revenue Service, visit www.irs.gov/faqs/index.html. To take your chances on the IRS helpline, call 800-829-1040

 

 Taxation with representation ain’t so hot either.     ~Gerald Barzan