I'd Be Speechless Without Kids' Books

My antiperspirant is making me stupid.

Blame the aluminum, sometimes linked to causing Alzheimer's disease. The doc says there's probably more risk from soda cans, cooking utensils, lack of exercise, dehydration and satellite brain control waves, but I like to blame the antiperspirant for mental lapses such as forgetting names or appointments, or leaving school lunches on the kitchen counter.

The worst mental lapses, though, come when actual adult cognition has been replaced with phrases from children's books. Humans have always relied on crutches for speeding information processing and composing coherent answers; hence the effectiveness of aphorisms, old sayings, fables, proverbs, and more recently, advertising jingles and tag lines.

This is why one should load the brain with elevated. Long ago, as a liberal arts undergraduate a bit over-full of the erudition being stuffed into his head, I would have prided myself on dropping references to Renaissance poets, or ancient philosophers, or economist John Maynard Keynes, who is so much in vogue these days.

One of my profs required everyone to memorize one hundred lines of Shakespeare. "Someday," he warned, "You'll be stuck in an airport with nothing to read; but one hundred lines of superb poetry will comfort you." He was right; I really have whiled away flight delays muttering "When to the sessions of sweet, silent thought...." This of course preceded the days when one could retrieve the Bard's entire collected works from the Web on a mobile phone. Sadly, that capability also means that one can wallow for hours in YouTube parodies of the Snuggie Blanket commercial. Dr. Platt, you've lost me to the mundane.

Yes, thanks to the stupefying effect of the antiperspirant, my habits of thought and speech closely resemble Michael Scott on The Office, whose mental life consists solely of movie quotes. Fortunately, my movie-quote hoard draws mainly from The Princess Bride or This Is Spinal Tap, so at least it's really funny stuff. This represents an upgrade from my younger years, when Everything I Really Needed To Know I Learned From Star Trek. Boldly go where no man has gone before. Keep your phasers set on stun. Tribbles hate Klingons, and Klingons hate tribbles. Solid stuff. (I also learned to kiss from watching Captain Kirk, presumably the reason I had such a hard time getting or keeping girlfriends. I was finally tamed by the love of a good woman (you know who you are) who said, essentially, "Stop that!")

Equally insidious to patterns of speech and thought are the malapropisms and family in-jokes which we use daily, and which turn into embarrassing gaffes. "Tell me more about the Hoth IRA," I said to my financial planner last month. Roth IRAs, it turns out, are a class of investment products for retirement. Hoth, on the other hand, is the Great Ice Planet where the Rebel Alliance takes shelter in The Empire Strikes Back. I once said it as a joke. It stuck. I repeated it to a money pro. I sounded nine years old.

Similarly, these driving directions: "Take a left onto Underpants Road, then..." "Left onto WHAT?" Cooper Road was named for the founder of what is now Jockey International, so naturally our kids call it Underpants Road. You don’t?

Hardly a day passes without a sound bite from children's books and children's TV slipping into adult use. This can backfire dreadfully. A fund-raising letter for our PTO used what I intended to be a quote from Bob the Builder; but apparently some parents wondered why I had lifted "Yes we can!" from the Obama presidential campaign. Oops. Come to think of it, maybe there's room for Lofty beside Timothy Geithner. "Can we fix it? Yes we can!"

Books provide the best quotables for managing daily life. From Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day, we learn that "Some days are like that. Even in Australia." In A Bargain for Frances, conniving badger Thelma urges us to seize the day: "This is what happens," Thelma tells Frances, "Some girls never do get their tea sets." Bet we say each phrase at least twice a day around our house.

The king of all quotables, though, is a treasure from my mother's childhood: Junket Is Nice, by Dorothy Kunhardt. Scour Amazon or used-book sites, for it is The Greatest Book Ever. All the people in world, see, are watching an old man eating and eating his junket, which is something in the pudding / Jell-O family of fine desserts. As they watch, they start guessing what he could possibly be thing about all this time. Each outlandish guess is met with "WRONG! said the old man, and he went on eating his junket." They're all gems: "A hippopotamus with all the lights turned out laughing at how hard it is to see the other people on the sofa;" and "A pelican pretending he can’t hear anyone calling him." And the Whopper Quotable of them all: "And then someone guessed… a tiger tiptoeing past the nursery, because the rule is no tigers clattering about during baby's naptime."

Who made this rule? When did it become necessary to devise rules for what should be household common sense? Isn't this just a another example of government intrusion into our private lives?

Then again, a lot of people use antiperspirants. Maybe they need quotes from kids' books to keep them upright and functioning. It seems I do.