The tradition of turkey and NFL football

By: 
Steve Lyon
Eye On Weiser
There are precious few things we can count on year in and year out in this tumultuous world. 
 The Maverik convenience stores are open 365 days of the year. Taxes are due in April and the Dallas Cowboys play football on Thanksgiving Day.
 The latter is a tradition  on Thanksgiving that I can remember as a kid in Idaho Falls and must date back to at least the 1970s or earlier. 
 We always played our own game of football before the big Thanksgiving dinner with the neighbor kids. What started out as a touch football game ended up being a tackle game with assorted sprains and injuries and sore loser feelings.
 Actually, this Thursday, I do believe an NFL triple-header is on the TV for your viewing pleasure. 
 The Cowboys are taking on the Redskins (Fox). The Detroit Lions are playing the Bears (CBS), but really the marquee game of the day will probably be the New Orleans Saints taking on the Atlanta Falcons (NBC). There is no love lost between those two teams.
 There is so much football to watch on Thanksgiving day that there won’t be any time to help with the many dishes and pots piled up in the kitchen sink. 
 That is, if you can stay awake in front of the TV after eating all that turkey, creamy mashed potatoes, yams, Brussel sprouts and stuffing. 
 Oh, but there is always room for dessert. No, please not another piece of pumpkin pie with real whipped cream, not Cool Whip. Well OK, if you already have it sliced.
• • •
 I’ve been in the wordsmith business for a long time. The language and how to craft stories with verve, clarity and literary style have been lifelong interests.
 Anyway, I paid particular attention to a story the other day that noted the 2018 Oxford word of the year just came out. 
 The Oxford dictionary editors pick a word every year that captures the zeigeist, a word that sums up the tone of the year, the mood of the masses.
 This year, the editors have chosen the word “toxic.” According to the Associated Press story, beyond its literal sense, people used the word “toxic” to describe relationships, politics and habits.
 This brings me to a story about words that I have told elsewhere. 
 As a reporter I once covered city hall  business in a small town that will go unnamed. The mayor had a humorous habit of mispronouncing and misusing the English language. So much so that he unwittingly became a neologist, a person who creates or coins new words.
 To this day, I remember a couple of the mayor’s neologisms.
 He used to say, in describing something that was so obvious and also so absurd, that it was obsurd. See, he combined the two words to make one of his own.
 Another one I recall he used when describing the onerous red tape of dealing with the federal government regarding some city project or issue.
 He said he was “flustrated” by the whole thing, which I took to mean he was equally frustrated and flustered.
 I used to chuckle at his unintended malapropisms. They were actually quite clever when you think about it.
 Steve Lyon is the editor of the Weiser Signal American. Contact him at scoop@signalamerican.com

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