In the car with three small children, headed for Storybook Island on a sunny afternoon, I had a moment of grandmotherly concern. “I need to stop and double-check that we have sunscreen,” I told the kids as I pulled over. I looked in the bag; the sunscreen was there; I resumed driving.
After a thoughtful pause, the not-quite-four-year-old piped up from the back seat. “Aren’t you going to double-check?”
“I did,” I told her. “I looked, and I found the sunscreen.”
“But doesn’t ‘double-check’ mean you look twice?”
Well, duh. Of course it does. Or at least it should, if you pay literal attention to the word instead of the way we use it. I didn’t really double-check; I only single-checked. It takes a clever grandchild (no bragging involved, of course) to notice that.
Which leads a reasonably clever grandmother to start thinking about some of the other words we use without paying much attention to their literal meaning.
Such as: Continue reading
Practical Prairie Woman 