Memorial Day and Funes the Memorious

I made it through the holiday weekend without redundancy. This is a covert way of saying I had no M and Ms from my mother’s shop for greedy children. Since the M in M and Ms is doubled, it is redundant and I am able to escape it on syntax alone. Elements of Style, man. Elements of Style. (This is to be spoken as David Clennon playing Palmer in John Carpenter’s The Thing: "Chariots of the gods, man. Chariots of the gods.")

Interestingly enough, my three evil nephews have a different approach. They consider M and Ms, or more properly, the name M and Ms, to be an oxymoron! In a mind-numbing display, they pointed out my mistake. This had been prefaced by a rather fast paced discussion of Ozzie and Harriet and its connection with Umberto Eco’s literature. “…the symbolism of Darby and Doc Williams…” “…Joe Randolph’s despair…” “…and everyone knows that it was Thorny!”
“Was what?” I said.
“What was what?”, nephew #3 inquired with the face of an angel.
“What was Thorny…don’t you mean who played Thorny?”, I replied.
“No…The Name of the Rose!…it was Thorny.”

This was followed by a laughter that you might expect would be the immediate prelude to a particularly unpleasant end of the world as we know it, with Hieronymus Bosch as the guy recording it on video. It was their opinion that in the nanosecond between the utterance of the first M and the second M, the atoms comprising the Ms were disentangled – across light years – and they became contraries.
For them saying M and Ms was like saying “Jumbo shrimp”.

At this juncture, it was an exquisitely small step to Jorge Luis Borges' story Funes the Memorious. Instead of being merely "M", the first M received the new name “Lavande de Valensole” and the second M “Ferris Buehler’s Day Off”. At this time, my mother put on her apron to prepare dinner (the M in “mother” becoming “Mystery Clock”) and gently shooed us from the summer kitchen with a kindly “retro, daimones!”
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