Readme:

Regarding several comments I have received about my recent comments about Columbus, Ohio, I have a news clipping to share. Everyone ready?

COLUMBUS, Ohio, April 23 (UPI) - An Ohio white supremacist - who
formerly was a lieutenant in the neo-Nazi Aryan Nations - and who
received a mail-order shipment of the bubonic plague germ from a
Maryland laboratory pleaded guilty in Columbus federal court to one
count of wire fraud.

Larry Wayne Harris, 46, was sentenced to 18 months' probation and
ordered to perform 200 hours of community service.

Harris' lawyer, George Luther, told the Columbus Dispatch his client
"intended no ill will. He did not intend to harm anyone."

Harris said he previously belonged to the Christian Identity Church,
a group that believes Jews are Satan's children and African-Americans
and other minorities are mud people.

BTW, if anyone feels that I am being unfair to Columbus by implying that the above is illustrative of the social and political climate there, I can only say that I lived in Columbus for ten years and I know wherof I imply. The place is infested with fascist nutters. Next topic.

Once again, these columns lack the funny drawings you have come to expect.
C’est la vie.
Go ahead, say it.

Look, gang, I came back to town and discovered that I was going to be writing a 500-word weekly newspaper column (entirely separate from the one you see here) for a major metropolitan daily plus doing another edition of my book. (And I am still not making enough to live on — ain’t life grand?) I’m afraid that the graphics are going to have to wait until I have a little more time than I do at the moment. But to make up for it, I’m going to post twice the usual number of columns this time. I am nice guy, yes?

Several people have written to say that my front page could use some work — that it is cluttered and confusing. You are absolutely right, and I plan to do something about it. Real soon now.

Tender are the hooks.

Dear WD: Living in the US, I keep in touch with my native Canada by a number of methods, one of which is my broker. In any event, she sent me an email the other day expressing the view that the current Canadian economic expansion is leaving the overall economy on “tender hooks,” which I took to mean that present good times are less than robust, somewhat fragile. But the expression “tender hooks” seems wrong. What’s the scoop? — Michael Raynor.

Ah, Canada. (Or should that be “O, Canada”?) Like many U.S. citizens, I have quite a few impressions of Our Northern Neighbor that probably bear only a remote relation to the truth. Let’s play “free association” with Canada for a moment and see who wins. Canada. Beavers. Mountains. Plaid. Moose. Plaid moose. Hmmm. Maple syrup. Waffles. Kitchen. Whoops, well, that’s what I get for writing this column first thing in the morning. In any case, I’ll bet I know something about Canada that you don’t — your National Grammatical Critter of the Day is the Mondegreen, and your broker has just proven it.

What she meant to say, although she didn’t know it, was that the Canadian economy was “on tenterhooks,” not “tender hooks,” which is indeed a “mondegreen” (a mis-heard word or phrase). Mondegreens, to which I devoted several columns recently, are often the result of hearing, rather than reading, an unfamiliar phrase.

So what, I hear you ask, are “tenterhooks,” anyway? Well, a “tenter” is, or was, a wooden frame on which freshly-woven cloth was stretched as it dried (“tenter” comes from the Latin “tendere” — “to stretch”). “Tenterhooks” were the hooks on the tenter which held the cloth in place, and, back when everyone knew what tenters were, “to be on tenterhooks” must have seemed like an excellent metaphor for “being in a painful state of suspense.” According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the phrase was first used in this sense in the mid-18th century by Tobias Smollet (“I left him upon the tenter-hooks of impatient uncertainty”). Although tenters are long gone, tenterhooks are with us still.