(annotated (if not explained))
“I want one of them caprese salads.”
(That’s what he said, but not really. That doesn’t capture the truth of the thing.
First, he didn’t say “of.” He hadn’t said “of” for several years, if we’re honest, and if we’re not, who can be? He made a sound more like “wunna,” which a conscientious writer might spell “one’a” or similar. The convention of dropping the letter f from the word “of” was neither invented by him nor by me, it being part of a swath of accents common to several English-speaking parts of the world. As a writer (I am a writer, by the way; greetings, hello, how do you do, thank you for coming and please feel free to put your feet on the desk), I had a decision to make, whether to render this charming bumbo’s weak witticism in dialect, or to simply put the incorrect idea into your head that he had used the correct part of speech—a preposition rather than a glorified grunt—and so give him more credit than he perhaps deserved. I settled on the half measure of truth—properly referred to as a “lie” by experts in the field—of retaining his maladroit substitution of “them” for the determiner “those,” while replacing his vocal effluence with words you, the reader (you are a reader, and you remain welcome, even if your shoes do happen to be dirtier than I initially thought) might recognize. Was the choice to render the words he said in this way correct, comedically? Perhaps you’d better have a seat, as we’ve not yet come to my worst offense.
A “charming bumbo,” incidentally, is also an idea that I did not create, but that I use freely. In a previous iteration of reality, a man sang a song. (This is by way of explanation, and I pledge to lead you down only the shortest of garden paths.) In the song, which the singer had written, lay the mousetrap of a lyric, “Charming bons mots will not hide your sins, for evil lives on after the death of men.” (It’s simultaneously trying to be earthy and too clever by half.) Enter a young child who feels a responsibility to the alleged scribe to find meaning in the hiddnen nooks and crannies of the creaky linguistic vehicle. And, from the mouth of said child comes the querry, “who are the charming bumbos, and why do they hide sins?”
I tell you now, I cannot give you a definition of such a one, except to tell you that he—the speaker with a desire for salad, not the hypothetical child or the ungainly meadowlark—is a charming bumbo.
But here again, I misstate the truest truth. He had no such desire, but only a gutteral want to place a brutish witticism into the aether. For once again I have sanitized his words to ease their passage from my pen—an anachronistic metaphor here, as I have not written even a one of these words with an honest pen, nor even properly typed them, but only stabbed and fumbled at a screen full of tiny stars to ask a miniscule, glass-and-steel pocket rectangle to assemble them for me in a form that can be beamed to your dazzling device of whatever flavor, camouflaged as if typed in ink but also no more than a twinkling of photons—to your brain.
And a poor joke it truly was. For, rather than the mot juste, a descriptor of a prepared dish of mozzarella, basil, vinegar, and tomato, he instead pounced upon an innocent word, rent it asunder with feral and dripping fangs, and twisted it into a form scarcely recognizable to the good people of Capri.
(The people of the island of Capri are the source of the word “Caprese.” Perhaps interesting to some, although Capri is a beautiful place—a famously pleasant destination for a quick soujourn without deep planning—scholars do not credit the island as the source of the word “Caprice.” Instead, both likely spring from the earlier root, “Capra,” referring to goats who live on Capri, and who—whether on Capri or off it—are known, on occasion, to frisk and caper.)
The word he actually spoke was unprintable—not, I should clarify, a word which is considered to be in poor taste to print (if you are worldly I need offer you no examples; if you are not I dare not pollute you) but simply one that cannot be reliably represented in text—by human effort. However, as your humble servant, I shall nevertheless endeavor the impossible.
The word was nearly “Kuh-pray-zee.” The inflections are the tricky bit to convey. To understand them, and so to understand why he said what he said, you must understand something of his intent. (I typically eschew omnicience in situations such as this, but as I heard the glottal effluence—to say nothing of the battrachian dissection that followed—and you did not, I may pretend some deeper understanding of the motivations behind it.)
This low wit seeking reputation by double meaning had noticed—although I use the word perhaps too freely, applying it as I am to this mangler of two innocent words that agree in sound but differ in sense—that the word “caprese” was not dissimilar to the word “crazy.” Therein lies the key to decyphering this grand and mysterious puzzle.
You see, he spoke the word “Caprese” as if speaking the word “Crazy,” hammed in the Vaudeville manner of three syllables—one falling, one rising, one harsh, the blueprint for many a poor and crude joke, lulling the listener, ratcheting tension, then delivering the punch—with the plosive inserted for comic effect. Thus, my prior approximation of “Ku-pray-zee.” (It must be noted, as much for historical rectitude as for completeness, as an eyewitness to his assault on the tongue, nary a knee was slapped. So he felt compelled to spend altogether too much of a minute explaining the germ, cultivation, and eventual gravamen of the sad, limp little thing he thought was a joke. The gist I render here for you, in spite of my better judgment: a salad being commonly an arrangement of various greens as a bed for a smaller quantity of other foodstuffs, a caprese salad is one that differs from this norm; thus, the mingling epithet he chose (I quite realize this disregards one common application of the term “salad” to include variations of deviled meats, to say nothing of the fact that basil is a leaf and tomato and cheese are common ingredients in many varieties of salad. I explain his justification; I do not defend his execrable choices.).)
I hope my sins of inexactitude can be forgiven in rendering this joke for you in language comprehensible although ultimately incorrect. He did say what he said, and in a way it was what I wrote, but in another it was wholly different, although perhaps equally—which is to say not particularly—uproarious.)