Ocelopotamus

Grendel from Earthgoat, always an attentive and keen-eyed reader, has written to gently chide me for conforming to a certain lowbrow usage in my 10-Second Interview post.

The question in question would be this one:

Pepsi or Coke?
Iced peppermint green tea.

Since that post and its comments are a fair way down the page at this point, I thought I should “front-page” (as the hep young kids say) his comment and my reply.

Grendel wrote:

There were many funny ones, but didn’t you mean “Peppermint green tea-upon-ice”? An understandable slip of the keyboard.

To which I replied:

Grendel, I thank and commend you for remembering the proper name of the beverage. As a fellow working editor, I know you know what it’s like to be compelled by common convention to spell (for example) grey as “gray” even though you know in your heart that “grey” is a much prettier way to spell the word. And so I have learned to conform to the way the rest of the world refers to my invention, and to hardly even notice that no one ever credits me. But your comment restores to me something of that sense of achievement I had, alone in my kitchen, the night I transformed the beverage world forever.

Note: A distrustful, paranoid sort of reader might suspect me of having deliberately made that error just to see if anyone would notice and raise the subject, so that I might link again to my original tea-upon-ice post, and its astonishing follow-up, in order to passive-aggressively remind the world of the staggering innovation I so selflessly bestowed on it, in hopes that the world may some day decide — of its own free accord, and out of a sense of what gentlefolk used to call “fair play” — to bestow upon me the credit that I disingenuously claim I don’t want.

You know the sort of idle, mean-spirited, tongue-wagging accusation I’m speaking of, the type of thing that is rarely said directly but usually put into the mouth of someone else, via convenient constructions like “some say … ” or “people are wondering … ”

Well. I am sure, and am very glad, that we are all above casting that sort of aspersion around here.