Here’s a suggestion for newspaper writers and editors: No more “well” in the middle of a sentence to indicate a sort of chuckling hesitation to say what some may think shouldn’t be said but one is going to say anyway, because, shucks, it ought to be said, as in this from Andrew Martin of Chi Trib Wash. bureau, p. one, 4/20:

After four years of preparation that cost $2.4 million, the U.S. Department of Agriculture on Tuesday unveiled its highly anticipated replacement for the food pyramid, and it is, well, another pyramid.

 

“Easiest dollar I made all day,” I told a fellow customer at Einstein’s after telling the young counter woman I was a dollar short on my change and receiving from her the dollar. Then I sat down and realized I’d been charged for a large coffee when I had ordered small with the comment that I’d be refilling it here, so why get large? Back I went to the counter for the easiest 30 cents I had made — or it turned out, would make — all day. The 30 cents was retrieved, as had the dollar, from the transparent plastic tip collector on the counter. Reflection: One may ask why if one is to sit drinking his endless-refill cup he would order a large, unless he was to supply the office when he got there.

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 The folks here at Einstein’s are people for whom the sheer rationality of doing things in organized fashion is a heavy burden. We know the feeling, do we not? It explains why some do well in business (or almost anything else), why some spend their days doing what others tell them to do (or else), why some fly high and others fly low. Not entirely. We also have life’s sharpies, corner-cutters who excape tedium, penury, and even the limitations of a modest life style. Chicago and Cook County politically connected chiselers come to mind, proficients of the wink and nod who appear regularly in the paper and less regularly in the courts and jails — wholly federal, we should note, since these matters are never grist for state and county mills of justice. Never. It’s enough to make a big-government advocate out of you.