Dec 7, 2009

Accusing Finger Of Blame Unfairly Points At Lamont For Mysterious Palouse Adjective Shortage

Once again, the lowly (and largely misunderstood!) Town of Lamont was forced to shoulder the blame for some societal anomaly or cultural conundrum largely outside of its control after local wordsmiths and self-described 'turners of a phrase' began to draw literary and conversational blanks as they tried in vain to inject linguistic color into the otherwise normally drab speech that seems to have the entire Palouse in its death-like grip. The Palouse, well known for being a 'region of few words', was even further hampered after it was learned that the Town of Lamont has not only commandeered a vast majority of the largely under-appreciated noun-modifiers but also tends to use them in such abundance that the 'average Joe" can't 'make hide-nor-hair out of the dern mess!", too.

"Well, I was dropping off a load a manure up Ewan way when I stopped by a little café for a piece of pie and I saw the sweetest little honey you ever heard tale of" said Festus Snopes, 56, an area farmer/rancher. "As she brought the week old berry concoction to my table, I decided to stun her with my marginally witty although largely stale and shopworn banter but all that came out of my slightly over-full mouth was "Ummmm. Good". How humiliating!!! She stared down at me like I was some sort of primitive caveman or guy from Idaho and just swished her way back to the kitchen - only to return once with the check. I didn't even get a coffee refill, for Pete's sake! That's when I knew that that dadburn Lamont had sucked up every available adjective in the whole tri-county area!" he fumed. "Sure, there are only so many polite ways to describe a week old piece of pie, but the task is made that much harder when every noun qualifier normally associated with unusual events or things outside the norm have all been hogged by a town nobody ever heard tale of! That's just so wrong! I have never been a standout with the ladies, but having soldiered thru the 11th grade, what I cannot win over with looks and brains and natural charm I can sometimes bamboozle with a few well-rehearsed one-liners gleaned from the earthy and largely conversationally utilitarian farm hands out on the ranch. That was before that no-good Lamont began to hoard every available qualifying word worth using, that is" he stammered bitterly. "There ain't a spare adverb, metaphor, simile or obscure (some would say arcane!) cultural reference to be had within 60 miles of northwest Whitman County, neither! That sort of thing just makes the whole 'courtship ritual' a tad more difficult for guys like me, that's all!"

When asked for comment, a spokesperson for the lowly Lamont Blog just gave an indeterminate and decidedly inarticulate grunt and sidled distractedly from the room, thus giving rise to speculation that the above referenced adjective crisis (why doesn't anyone ever remember the lowly adverb?!), rather than being caused by a given party in particular, might indeed be an undiscriminating linguistic plague that doesn't show favoritism as its blandness-inducing spores fan out on the conversational winds to transform an important part of the Inland Northwest into a conversational graveyard not seen since that whole 'Tower of Babel' language confusion thing all those years ago.

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